Nursing Homes In Trouble
I spend a lot of time at nursing homes rounding on patients. My group has contracted with a company which has several skilled nursing care facilities. None of these places are Disneyland, but they keep the patients clean and safe and are able to give IV medications and other therapies as ordered. They pass their inspections.
The reason I bring this up is
this article which I saw today:
Substandard care remains rampant at nursing homes throughout the country, according to the General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress. Twenty percent of homes evaluated during an 18-month study ending January 2002, had "serious deficiencies that caused residents actual harm or placed them in immediate jeopardy," the report states.
Investigators criticized state-run systems designed to police nursing homes, saying that they suffer from a lack of consistent standards that cause them to routinely understate the danger that inadequate care poses to elderly nursing home residents.
Sad but true. As I said, my group takes care that the homes where we place patients are safe, and we've dropped contracts for subadequate care. We have to keep checking because these places are running on a tight budget, and here's one reason:
Many lawmakers remain concerned that nursing homes are poorly paid by the Medicaid health system for low-income persons, forcing facilities to make up shortfalls by charging Medicare, the program that finances care for the elderly.
Most custodial, or long-term, patients switch to Medicaid (here it's known as Medi-Cal) to pay their costs. These plans never paid very much to begin with, and chances are good that reimbursements are going to be slashed. Whether these places are going to stay in business I don't know - we'll have to see. Probably they will have to raise their rates significantly for the patients who don't qualify for Medicaid and are paying cash. I also worry that standards of care may slip further and we will be faced with yet more dangerous situations for the elderly in nursing homes.
posted by Dr. Alice at #
