In one instance, an 18-year-old high school student working at a nursing home<\/a> reportedly began having sex with multiple residents<\/a> and encouraged his friends to apply for jobs at the facilities, according to Fox 13<\/a>.<\/p>\n The broadcaster noted two other incidents, one involving a nursing assistant who started a sexual relationship with a resident who was more than 50 years older than she was. In another, police found a physical therapy aide attempting to have sex with an 80-year-old woman who had been reported missing.<\/p>\n When police interviewed the assistant and asked him if he genuinely had romantic feelings for the woman, he reportedly said “No. But she wanted me to, and I was willing,” according to Kaye Lynn Wootton, director of the Medicaid Fraud and Patient Abuse Division within the Utah Attorney General\u2019s Office.<\/p>\n She recounted the above incidents to state lawmakers last year while discussing the increasingly common problem.<\/p>\n open image in gallery<\/p>\n Utah officials are grappling with how to handle increasing reports of unlicensed staff at nursing homes and long-term care facilities are beginning consensual sexual relationships with residents (PA Wire)<\/p>\n Wootton warned that these relationships, while not necessarily illegal, can create power imbalances between the residents and the people responsible for their care and well-being.<\/p>\n \u201cImagine when that relationship, if there was a real relationship, goes south,\u201d she told the lawmakers. \u201cThose same people have to bathe them and dress them. And it\u2019s just inappropriate and puts these people in a very bad position.\u201d<\/p>\n Non-consensual contact between staff and patients in long-term care facilities is illegal, and there are also professional conduct rules prohibiting licensed caregivers \u2014 such as doctors or nurses \u2014 from engaging in even consensual sexual relationships with patients.<\/p>\n Those same prohibitions do not extend to unlicensed staff, such as CNAs, housekeepers, or food service employees.<\/p>\n Utah state Sen. Jennifer Plumb \u2014 an emergency room doctor when she’s not in the halls of power \u2014 sponsored a bill last year to make such relationships illegal. She told Fox 13 that while working on the legislation, she was told stories about \u201cindividuals who had jumped from one facility to another facility to another facility to another facility” and becoming entangled in relationships in each.<\/p>\n \u201cI think this is happening frequently enough we probably need to look at what sort of standard we can set up and what sort of protections we can put in place,” she said.<\/p>\n She said she would prefer to address the issue by introducing licensing but said there was “no way as a state that we could do that.”<\/p>\n \u201cThat means there has to be a criminal penalty piece associated with it,\u201d she argued. \u201cOtherwise, we are not going to be able to track these and we are also not going to be able to disincentivize it.\u201d<\/p>\n The Independent has requested comment from Plumb. <\/p>\n Nate Crippes, an attorney with the Disability Law Center, has argued against criminalizing the relationships because such a law would only punish one side of the consensual relationships.<\/p>\n “My colleague uses a wheelchair,” Crippes told FOX 13. \u201cAnd if each of us were to engage in sexual conduct with a nurse who was providing us care or something like that, it would be a crime for that nurse if she or he did that with him but not with me. And that really seemed discriminatory to us.\u201d<\/p>\n He argued that if the unlicensed staff members who are engaging in these relationships are also regularly being fired from their jobs for doing so, then that suggests the accountability systems in place are working.<\/p>\n \u201cIf there\u2019s a subset of the health care industry \u2014 you know, the CNAs or the techs or whatever they are \u2014 that are unregulated such that they can go around and engage in activity they shouldn\u2019t, get fired, and then just go get another job, I don\u2019t think the answer is to criminalize that,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":444120,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[102,2960,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-444119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-health","tag-healthcare","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/444119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=444119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/444119\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/444120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=444119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=444119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=444119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Utah](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/23dda3c89e842672c00a7943c4dcc0f9Y29udGVudHNlYXJjaGFwaSwxNzQ3MzE4MTAz-2.79584954.jpg\")
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