Articles Posted in Resident Safety

As the population ages, and life expectancy continues to increase, nursing homes are becoming a part of more and more Americans’ lives. As a result, Maryland nursing homes are caring for more residents than ever. Family members who place their loved one in a nursing home want to ensure that they are safe and being taken care of, but sometimes finances or other concerns force families to place loved ones in subpar institutions. Unfortunately, loved ones can suffer from nursing home abuse that often goes unreported. A common yet overlooked form of this abuse is food safety violations, which occur frequently in Maryland nursing homes and can cause serious illness, or even death.

A recent investigative report found that there are thousands of food safety violations in nursing homes across the country each year. According to a news article discussing the report’s findings, cockroaches, flies, mold, and mouse droppings are just a few of the unsanitary conditions found in nursing homes over the last three years. In fact, unsafe food handling was the third most frequent violation in nursing homes in 2018. That same year, 33% of nursing homes were issued citations for not safely storing, preparing, and serving food. And many of these instances are not just one-time mistakes: since 2016, approximately 33% of all nursing homes were cited multiple times for the same food safety violations.

These safety violations, while concerning in any kitchen, are of utmost concern in nursing homes because people over 65 are especially susceptible to foodborne illnesses. Unlike restaurants where a patron can get up and leave, nursing home residents often have no choice but to stay and eat in their institution. The result can be deadly: the report also found that, between 1998 and 2017, there were 230 foodborne illness outbreaks in long-term care settings such as nursing homes, which resulted in at least 45 deaths, 532 hospitalizations, and 7,648 people getting ill.

Incidents of Maryland nursing home abuse can be challenging to quantify because many victims are unable to report their injuries. Additionally, loved ones are often placed in subpar institutions because their families did not have the means or ability to evaluate the facility adequately. These factors, in addition to many others, have caused a rising rate of nursing home abuse incidents in Maryland.

According to a recent news report, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) launched a consumer alert feature on its website designed to warn people of nursing home violations. The CMS operates a website called “Nursing Home Compare,” which provides consumers with information about Medicare and Medicaid certified nursing homes in the United States. The website enables individuals to see whether a nursing home meets the minimum federal standards regarding things such as staffing, health, and safety. However, the website does not readily provide a way for people to discover any instances or allegations of abuse against a nursing home. In fact, a recent Senate report publicized a government finding of increasing nursing home abuse cases by facilities that rated as poorly performing but did not receive additional scrutiny.

The new alert intends to offer consumers a new and easy way to identify nursing homes with citations and other safety violations quickly. The alert will go live in October, 2019 and will flag facilities that had negative inspection reports on abuse in the past year or behaviors that could have led to harm in the past two years.

The federal government is keenly aware of the fact that many Maryland nursing homes, as well as nursing homes across the country, routinely provide residents with an insufficient level of care. For this reason, each year, the federal government releases a report detailing the state of the country’s nursing homes. This June, Senators Casey (D-PA) and Toomey (R-PA) released a report entitled “Families’ and Residents’ Right to Know: Uncovering Poor Care in America’s Nursing Homes.”

The report begins by noting that aging citizens who live in nursing homes too often experience “outright neglect,” and that some residents are subjected to physical or sexual abuse. In an attempt to reduce the number of homes exposing residents to this neglect and abuse, the federal government implemented the Special Focus Facility (SFF) program. The SFF program seeks to identify the most problematic nursing homes across the country and increase supervision over these facilities. Once a facility is in the SFF program, it must be inspected no less than once every six months. Non-participants must be inspected once every 15 months.

The selection process for the SFF program focuses on those nursing homes that “persistently underperform in required inspections.” Under the SFF program, up to 88 nursing homes are selected, which amounts to less than .6 percent of all skilled care facilities in the United States. These facilities are referred to as “participants,” and the government releases the name of the facility to the public to assist potential residents in making important care decisions.