Today, we are refreshing our Nursing
Home Inspect app to include
thousands more deficiencies found by government inspectors in nursing homes
around the country.
Our tool, based on data from the U.S.
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
(CMS), has already led to an impressive array of news stories.
The Shreveport Times reported that a resident with
dementia at a Bossier City, La., nursing home
went missing for more than 3½ hours last year before staff went looking
for her. A worker found Hattie Mae Chambers “outside the facility lying in a fetal position
near a fence, her white socks
covered in grass,” the paper reported. “Blood was coming from her nose and
mouth, and was pooled on the ground. The 57-year-old mother of three was dead.
A police report later would reveal Chamber’s body temperature was 118 degrees.”
The Columbus Dispatch wrote about a nursing home in Yellow Springs, Ohio, at which a worker last year “opened the door of a resident’s room and saw another aide on top
of the resident, having sex. The worker shut the door
and went to get a supervisor, leaving the partially paralyzed woman alone with
her abuser. The abusive aide continued working for more than an hour before
being ordered to leave, and was later fired.”
The Daily News of Los Angeles found that 125 residents at a local nursing home had to remain in rooms last year that reached up to 90 degrees after the
air-conditioning had failed for days.
And the Contra Costa Times reported on an Oakland, Calif., home at which the owner yanked family pictures off a resident’s wall, “took away a crackers-and-jelly bedtime snack, and said the
resident could not keep other food items relatives had left. Eyes welling with
tears, the resident told an investigator how much it meant to have photos of
relatives in the room. ‘Why did they do that to me?’ the resident asked.”
ProPublica has not done its own nursing home reviews.
Rather, Nursing Home Inspect relies on the government, which first
began publishing the narrative
portions of inspections last month.
The CMS data cover all deficiencies identified
during each home’s most-recent periodic review, known as a standard survey. It
also includes complaint investigations from at least the past 12 months.
Nursing Home Inspect allows users to search all inspection reports
by keyword to look for problems that may appear across the country. Results can
be sorted by state or severity level. Our tip sheet offers suggestions about how to get the best search results.
In addition to adding more reports to
its site last week, CMS stopped redacting residents’ genders in inspection
reports — though it continues to redact information about residents’
diagnoses and medications.
As of today, the app includes 134,602
deficiencies from nearly 15,000 nursing homes. They represent 26,990 separate
visits by inspectors.
The inspectors rated the majority of
the deficiencies, nearly 57 percent, with a severity score of D, on a scale of
A (least severe) to L (most severe). A “D” score signals an isolated instance
in which the violation created the potential for harm, but in which no actual
harm occurred.
The most common deficiency, cited
8,281 times, was a home’s failure to ensure that it was free of accident
hazards and that each resident received adequate supervision and assistance to
prevent accidents. The second most-common related to infection control. A recent blog post said nursing home inspectors have increasingly
cited homes for the failure of their staffs to wash their hands.
Nursing home industry officials have
cautioned that while the reports can be of value when choosing a home, they are
only a snapshot and don’t highlight good practices in the home. The American
Health Care Association, a nursing home industry group, has launched a program
that each year recognizes homes that it says are working to improve the quality of care.
