Attitudes of nursing and rest home administrators toward deinstitutionalized elders with psychiatric disorders

The administrators of 92 nursing homes and rest homes in western Massachusetts were surveyed on their experiences with elderly residents with a history of psychiatric hospitalization and their willingness to admit such individuals in the future. A majority of those who had admitted deinstitutionalized elders with chronic psychiatric disorders reported having experienced severe problems with them. Most of the problems involved the resident going into crisis or producing some highly disruptive behavior. Although two-thirds of the facilities had admitted elders who had been deinstitutionalized from a public psychiatric hospital, only one-quarter clearly planned to do so in the future. Three quarters of the administrators reported that they did not have the support services that the deinstitutionalized elders in their facilities needed. A comparison of the services reported to be important and those reported to be available suggest that simply increasing the availability of psychiatric support services would probably not influence administrators to admit elders with chronic mental illness in the future.