By Steve Moran

This may be the single most damaging, unfair, and ridiculous messaging coming out of the press, politicians, and pundits.

I have a close lifelong friend who works in social services, addressing issues of elder abuse. A few days ago she called to tell me about a multimillion dollar wrongful death judgment against a senior living community in her region. Her outrage was palpable, and the bits of the news story she read to me were pretty damning.

The one thing that most outraged her was how the attorney representing the senior living community repeatedly argued that even if there were a judgment against the community, the woman was old and would die soon, and as such, her life did not have all that much economic value.

She finished her recital saying that someone (which means the government) needs to do something about all those for-profit senior living companies that only care about profits.

This is a frustrating, horrible condemnation. It is NOT a condemnation of nameless, faceless companies but rather a condemnation of the leaders of these companies, and it does not come close to describing a single for-profit senior living leader I know … and I know a lot of them!

She and the Public Mostly Get It Wrong

I don’t know enough about what happened in this particular situation to offer an opinion about the validity of the case, but I do know that if I had been on the jury and the attorney representing the community kept telling me how little value the older person had, I would have gone out of my way to punish him and the senior living community, which is what happened.

While there are some operators that don’t care about quality, that don’t care about residents, don’t care about safety, they are extremely rare, and they don’t actually last very long in the business. It would be impossible to survive operating that way. They would end up having these kinds of problems and resulting lawsuits over and over again. This pattern simply does not exist.

The Truth

The truth is that nearly all of the senior living leaders in our industry passionately and deeply care about the residents they serve, the teams they serve. They are doing all they can to protect a very vulnerable group of people who are mostly living out the last chapters of their lives.

Those last chapters are often messy and complicated — with no perfect solutions or easy answers. As I sit here writing this article, I am living it with my 91-year-old stepfather, with whom I spent six hours in the emergency room this past Friday night, getting home at 2 in the morning. They are doing the very best they can under very difficult circumstances, and in most cases everyone has an opinion about what should or shouldn’t be done.

Better Conversations and Communication

As a starting point, we should be talking about hard choices where none are very good. We should be talking about how it is easy — after making a decision and things still go bad — to second-guess the decision.

We need to be talking about these things when we sell senior living, setting proper expectations. It may feel like we are shooting ourselves in the foot, but that is wrong. We are actually setting the stage for a better experience for everyone.

When We Screw Up

If we are honest, sometimes we get it wrong, and sometimes when we get it wrong, there are catastrophic results. This happens in the very best senior living communities and organizations, just like it happens in the very best hospitals. When it happens we need to own it, make amends the best we can (under the careful guidance of good and compassionate legal council), learn from it, and move forward.