Finding a Nursing Home

 

        Finding a suitable and safe nursing home requires patience and computer skills. 

        I attended a learning seminar on April 6, “The National Imperative to Improve Nursing Home Quality,” summarizing the findings of the National Academies study on nursing homes in America. Their findings illuminated the efficiency of 1,986 nursing homes including family caregivers. As stated by the moderator, “The pandemic lifted the veil on what was an invisible social ill for decades.” The issues found in the study existed before the pandemic and will continue unless action is taken now.

          Major points: The way in which the United States finances and delivers nursing home care is inefficient, fragmented, and unsustainable. There is an underinvestment and lack of accountability. The quality of care that has been in place for 35 years has not been enforced. There is no shared commitment yet nursing home patients represent the most vulnerable in the population. I have provided a link below for the comprehensive report. http://nationalacademies.org/nursing-homes

          As a gerontologist, I have been familiar with the problems in nursing homes since I started researching this topic over twenty years ago. There is no accountability, no oversight, and finding an acceptable one for family placement is next to impossible. It requires a quantitative examination of the most recent deficiencies, not a Yelp review. Overworked discharge planners give family members a list and wish them good luck.

I am getting more requests for quantitative nursing home analysis, as most people do not know how to do it. It is time consuming and the unredacted data set is overwhelming for most people. The most unredacted data, however, is from April of 2019, two years ago. If you have the time and the patience and are computer savvy, this link is a good start. It doesn’t provide all of the data needed, but it is easy to determine which ones to avoid. For example, a severity score of D is minor, while a L indicates jeopardy to the life of the patient/patients. https://projects.propublica.org/nursing-homes/summary  

Another excellent comparison tool is from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Medicare.gov. The three quality measures are Health Inspections, Staffing, and Quality Measures. Review all of them. https://www.medicare.gov/care-compare/?providerType=NursingHome&redirect=true#search