Reply #179: Texas Adult Protective Services is bad, also.. [View All]

[rainbow4321]

Believe me, there are a hell of a lot of households flying under the radar of both CPS and APS..none of which you hear about til a tragedy hits the news:

Back when I did homecare nursing I had to deal with Texas APS alot.
For those in this thread who said a homecare nurse or other professional should have been doing home visits, consider the following:

No matter horrible the home situation was, if the adult homecare patient was at ALL coherent, APS would not take the pt out of the home...didn't matter if the family never bought them food, never cleaned the patient up, used their monthly SSI for people other then the patient...if the adult said they didn't want to leave, APS would not intervene.
Unfortunately, many of the family members were extremely talented at intimidating the patient into refusing to leave the home. It would just KILL me to continue to deal with these families.
You know it is a BAD environment when you would be doing the home safety checkoff list during the initial home care visit and when you ask "Do you have working smoke detectors?" and an elderly couple responded "Well, we had smoke detectors but our son came and stole them...he has a drug problem and probably needed to try and sell them or something". You learn real quick to not have anyone or anything between you and the DOOR during these homecare visits..and you go as early as you can in morning cuz the troublemakers in the neighborhood are still hungover and passed out somewhere.