Let’s Get It On!: Nursing Home Nookie
In high school, it was foggy car windows at the look-out point. In college, it was a sock on the doorknob. When you finally got your own home, you could rejoice in the fact that you didn’t have to sneak around for sex anymore…until the kids came along and it was locked doors and stolen weekends.
It seems like all our lives, we expend considerable effort to protect the privacy of our most intimate encounters, but a recent Los Angeles Times article pointed out the near-impossibility of finding an unmonitored moment between consenting adults in nursing homes.
Faced with always-open doors, watchful staff, and roommates, a nursing home resident can quickly go from relatively independent lifestyle to a lock-down experience with maid service and medical oversight.
A 2007 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that 53 percent of adults ages 65 to 74 report being sexually active. That figure drops to 26 percent for adults ages 75 to 85. The drop can be attributed to multiple factors, including declining health, lack of potential partners, – women have a longer life expectancy than men – and even the lack of available privacy in long-term care facilities.
New York Times source, Professor Eddie Hargrove says that hand-holding, kissing, and petting “probably would go further than a little medication at 10 o’clock at night” setting up the premise that sexual activity is beneficial to one’s health at any age.
So, as Ira Rosofsky of the Times asks, “does it make sense that it’s easier to get a conjugal visit in jail than in a nursing home?”
The Nursing Home Reform Act of 1987 contains a Residents’ Bill of Rights, which requires federally funded nursing homes to recognize a resident’s right to privacy and to accommodate his or her personal needs. The law’s aim here is to ensure that nursing homes provide an environment in which each resident can “attain and maintain his or her highest practicable physical, mental and psychosocial well-being.”
And in California, the Welfare and Institutions Code specifies that residents have the right “to live in an environment that enhances personal dignity, maintains independence and encourages self-determination,” and “to participate in activities that meet individual physical, intellectual, social and spiritual needs.”
But it’s safe to say that a vast majority of nursing homes are not measuring up, and residents are faced with a choice between forgoing the frisky behavior or risking an embarrassing intrusion by staff or roommates.
It’s enough to make them feel like over-protected teenagers, again.
James D. Perry
Tags: Elder Law
