Over 90% of Nursing Homes Receive Violations

Every year the Office of the Inspector General inspects the 15,000 nursing homes in the United States.  Every year, some of those nursing homes get low marks, some get average and some do better than others.  This was not your typical year.

This year nearly 95% of nursing homes received violations of various types when they were inspected.  Some typical violations included violations for infected bedsores, charging Medicare for procedures that were not performed and charging Medicare extra for patients who were listed as more critical than they actually were.

In addition to these violations – which are not the most serious – there were other more serious violations which were considered deficiencies that caused actual harm or immediate jeopardy to patients according to the Department of Health and Human Services.  17% of the nursing homes received these violations.  Some of these problems included the infected bedsores, lack of adequate nutrition, medication mix ups and abuse and neglect of patients.

There are usually 3 types of nursing homes.  They are for-profit, non-profit and government owned.  Surprisingly, the for-profit nursing homes received the highest number of violations at 94%.  The non-profits received 88% and the ones owned by the government received 91%.  These are extremely high numbers of violations.

Some violations are generated by complaints.  Inspectors received over 37,000 complaints about issues or conditions in nursing homes last year, and they were able to verify nearly 40%, which is a great many substantiated complaints.  The question that lurks in the back of one’s mind is how many legitimate complaints did not get filed for fear of reprisals, abuse, loss of benefits or other reasons?  Could there be as many or more complaints that are never reported or never heard? 

Regardless, the figures that have been released are critical and sobering.  After all, these are our parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles.  If they are not ours, they are somebody’s.  They are the very most vulnerable among our population and according to these figures nearly 95% of these elderly, vulnerable people in nursing homes are not being cared for adequately, much less respectfully, kindly and decently.

Medicare just put into place new rules governing what they will not pay hospitals for – mainly neglect and mistakes that are the hospital’s fault.  From looking at all the information and figures regarding nursing homes, it sounds like a good idea to do the same to protect seniors so that nursing homes have to do a much better job taking care of them if they want to be paid, as well.