After nursing home staff allegedly
failed to respond to a resident's medical concerns, he called 911
himself but died upon arrival at an Illinois hospital.
A
Florida facility allegedly neglected to clean blood sugar measuring
devices between testing different patients, risking infection.
The
federal government puts a warning label on the first facility, but the
second is one of nearly 400 nursing homes nationwide with a "persistent
record of poor care" that are not publicly identified, according to a Senate report released Monday.
Pennsylvania's senators released a list
of those facilities on Monday, questioning why their names are not
disclosed like those in a smaller group of nursing homes where
inspectors found health, safety or sanitary problems.
Among the facilities on a list the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services provided
is a Texas nursing home whose management allegedly failed to fix a
waste system backup. Staff continued to serve food from the kitchen, the
report says, despite a foul-smelling black substance coming through the
drains and "seeping into the kitchen floor."
“When a family makes the hard decision to seek nursing
home services for a loved one, they deserve to know if a facility under
consideration suffers from systemic shortcomings,” said Sen. Pat
Toomey, R-Pa., who along with Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., issued the report
About 1.3 million Americans
are nursing home residents, cared for in 15,600 facilities, according
to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The federal
government in April identified about 3 percent of them as problematic in
one of two categories, according to the report.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services publicly discloses the
names of about 80 nursing homes that investigators frequently check on
to resolve documented issues. The agency calls them participants in
the Special Focus Facility program.
If they don't improve, they can be cut off from Medicare and Medicaid. The government's Nursing Home Compare website identifies them with a small yellow triangle.
The
400 facilities highlighted by senators on Monday qualify for
the program because of a "persistent record of poor care," but are not
selected because of limited resources, according to the report. The senators describe the candidates as "nearly indistinguishable" from the smaller group.
Federal
budget cuts in 2014 limited the number of nursing homes the agency can
put in the oversight program, Medicaid Services Administrator Seema
Verma said in a May letter to Senator Casey.
Full Article & Source:
Nursing home negligence: Senate report names nearly 400 facilities with 'persistent record of poor care'
No comments:
Post a Comment