Film Description

When elders and their families worry about the risk of patient abuse in long-term care facilities, they are usually thinking about abuse or neglect by staff. However, recent studies reported in the Archives of Internal Medicine and Journal of the American Geriatrics Society suggest that elders living in nursing homes may have more to fear from their fellow residents. One study suggested that as many as 88,000 (or about 6.8 percent) of U.S. nursing home residents are physically aggressive each week -- hitting, scratching, or in some cases sexually abusing others.

The situation is similar in Canada, where a series of reports have recommended changes in staff training and institutional protocols; for the most part these recommendations have been ignored. In this very disturbing documentary, CBC journalist take their sometimes concealed cameras into a variety of long-term care facilities to reveal the reality of what is happening and what is being done -- or more often not done -- about it.