New Report Examines Nursing Home Trends
The National Consumer Voice for Quality Long Term Care, NCCNHR, recently published an article summarizing a new report by the University of California, San Francisco, showing trends in U.S. nursing homes by state for 2003 through 2008.
"These trends in nursing homes should be of concern to policy makers, nursing home providers, and consumer advocates because they do not show major improvements over the past seven years. Moreover, they show continued wide variations in staffing, residents, quality of care and enforcement across states."
Here are a few points I found particularly interesting:
- The average number of deficiencies issued to nursing homes for violations of federal regulations, per facility, increased by 7.5 percent between 2003 and 2008.
- The number of for-profit nursing homes increased while the number of non-profit and public homes decreased.
- Staffing levels have increased slightly over the last decade. Unfortunately, "[t]he average staffing levels are far below the level recommended by experts which is 0.75 RN hours per resident day and 4.1 total hours of nurse staffing per resident day."
Under New Mexico law, nursing homes must provide only 2.5 hours of nurse staffing per resident day, which is far below the recommended 4.1 hours cited by NCCNHR. More importantly, however, under the Federal rules, nursing homes must provide a sufficient number of qualified staff to meet the needs of the residents.
