bureaucratic system: A positive or negative effect on nursing home quality of care?

Over the last fifty years quality of care has been a consistent problem in nursing home facilities. The federal government implemented a bureaucratic system as an attempt to improve this standard. This thesis traces the emergence of this system in nursing homes and illustrates its failure to solve the problem. George Ritzer's four-point McDonaldization model of bureaucracy is applied to argue that the bureaucratic system for governing nursing homes has a negative effect on the quality of care. Although this hypothesis has proven to be accurate, additional factors were consistently cited as having detrimental effects on resident care. These include issues such as insufficient pay and lack of training/education for CNAs. Moreover, human greed and societal views of the elderly appear to be the true root of the problem.