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Trends in Nursing Home Deficiencies and Complaints

By Beth Janicek

There was a memorandum sent to the Acting Administrator for Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services from the Inspector General for the Department of Health & Human Services regarding “Trends in Nursing Home Deficiencies and Complaints.” This study addresses the quality of care in nursing homes and analyzes the recent data on deficiencies and complaints at nursing homes.

Over 91% of nursing homes surveyed were cited for deficiencies. For profit nursing homes were cited for deficiencies at a higher percentage than not-for-profit nursing homes. The most common deficiency cited were quality of care, resident assessment, and quality of life. Seventeen percent of surveyed nursing homes in 2007 were cited for actual harm or immediate jeopardy. The number of substantiated complaints decreased nearly 3% since 2005.

I have blogged on this very issue wherein Texas nursing homes rarely get cited by the Texas Department of Aging and Disability Services. Understaffing is not cited as deficiency in the reports because the regulation is written too broad to enforce. It is a well known fact that there is not sufficient staffing in the nursing homes which causes many of the injuries and incidents. The government will not write a regulation which requires the amount of time staff should spend with each resident or the number of staffing needed for each resident to ensure their safety.

The most common deficiencies discussed earlier would not be as much of an issue if nursing homes had adequate staffing and if a regulation was in place so as to cite these facilities for understaffing. The quality of care, resident assessment and quality of life would increase if each resident was taken care of by more staffing.

If you have a loved one in a nursing home and have any thoughts or opinions regarding nursing home deficiencies, complaints, understaffing or any other issue involved in the nursing home setting, I’d like to hear about them.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Beth Janicek

Full post as published by San Antonio Personal Injury Lawyer on December 30, 2008 (boomark / email).