GAO Faults State Nursing Home Inspections
The woes of nursing homes and, more importantly, those in their care continue. Already facing a major reform bill in Congress that has divided the industry, nursing homes came under fire this afternoon in a new report from the Government Accountability Office.
The GAO review of state-level nursing home inspections found that inspectors regularly overlooked major code violations in the care facilities. In reviews conducted from 2002 to 2007, federal inspectors found that their state-level counterparts missed violations of the gravest nature—those that could put a nursing home resident in immediate jeopardy and inflict actual harm—15 percent of the time. The potential for less serious harm was found in 70 percent of the federal reviews.
The report was requested by the Senate's Special Committee on Aging, which has been spearheading reform in the nursing home industry. The report, filed to the committee today, concludes that "poor quality of care—worsening pressure sores or untreated weight loss—in a small but unacceptably high number of nursing homes continues to harm residents or place them at risk of death or serious injury."
—Bret Schulte
Reader Comments
nursing-home abuse
Abuse exists. Having spent 3-4 hours daily for 10 years with my 80-year old sister, pralyzed from the neck down, and finding her with broken upper-arm bones (two breaks within 6 months and all three within one year)--in a Washington, Ill., nursing home that has many lwsuits pending and should be shut down, and another, supposedly the best in the west, equally as negligent.
nursing homes
I've worked in the field for almost 25 years, it doesn't need to be this way, I see CNA's working very hard and doing the right things. The regulations are massive and if you truly wanted all the regulations complied with you would need 1 staff person for every 5 residents which the government nor anyone else seems to want to pay for. What we need is a working collobarative with the government and health care to make the changes necessary to give every elder the quality of care and life they deserve. We need to spend less time on paper compliance and more time with the resident.
The other big problem probably one of the main reasons we have these problems, you can't make healthcare a for-profit business, owners want the return, the return should go back into the nursing home to make improvements, but the for profit world wants a bigger bottom line.
The less for profits in this industry the better the care will ultimately be!!!
It is also called, business as usual.
So, What else is new? The GAO is part of the bureaucracy which feeds at the public trough. I suspect that most of them are pushing paper too.
It is no different in any so-called Civil Service Organization. I have worked in several of them most of my adult life. All seem to have bloated budgets and are loaded with drones who just go through the motions.
How long have we had Nursing Homes?
How long have we had the GAO inspecting them?.
Does anyone expect that anything is going to change? I sure don't
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