Ethel Paley, voice for nursing home patients, dies
NEW YORK — Ethel Paley, a social worker who for 35 years was at the forefront of helping nursing home patients and their families navigate the labyrinthine health care system, redress hidden abuses in treatment and lobby for systemic solutions, died on Nov. 18 at her home in Manhattan. She was 99.
Her death was confirmed by her daughter Eliza Paley.
From its inception at the height of the scandals over nursing home care in New York in 1976 until the organization went broke in 2011 after the recession, Paley dedicated her career to Friends and Relatives of the Institutionalized Aged, a nonprofit organization of which she was the founding executive director.
Even after she stepped down from that post in 1979, she continued to serve the agency and her elderly peers for decades, well into her own advanced age, as president, board member, paid staff member and volunteer.
“Even though it was descriptive, our full name still reeked of a ‘social work’ look at the world,” Paley recalled in 2011, “so we eventually dropped it and just use FRIA instead.”
The organization became a clearinghouse for the latest information on the rights of patients, the services to which they were entitled and the complaints that had been lodged against individual nursing homes in New York City.
FRIA operated a telephone help line in English and Spanish to answer questions from nursing home residents, their friends and relatives and to guide them to other resources for assistance. Social work students were recruited to staff the line. They fielded often frantic calls about arbitrary and involuntary discharges and transfers from nursing homes and allegations of abuse, neglect, retaliation and racial, ethnic and religious discrimination.
Ethel Louise Schneider was born on Oct. 8, 1920, in Manhattan to Herman and Ida (Fahrni) Schneider. Her father was a restaurateur, her mother a homemaker.
She was inducted into the Columbia School of Social Work Hall of Fame in 2014.
In addition to their daughter Eliza, she is survived by another daughter, Claudia Paley; and a granddaughter.