Care Suffers as More Nursing Homes Feed Money Into Corporate Webs

[SummerMadness]

Care Suffers as More Nursing Homes Feed Money Into Corporate Webs

When one of Martha Jane Pierce's sons peeled back the white sock that had been covering his 82-year-old mother’s right foot for a month, he discovered rotting flesh.

"It looked like a piece of black charcoal" and smelled "like death," her daughter Cindy Hatfield later testified. After Mrs. Pierce, a patient at a nursing home in Memphis, was transferred to a hospital, a surgeon had to amputate much of her leg.

Kaiser Health News's analysis of inspection, staffing and financial records nationwide found shortcomings at other homes with similar corporate structures:

• Homes that did business with sister companies employed, on average, 8 percent fewer nurses and aides.
• As a group, these homes were 9 percent more likely to have hurt residents or put them in immediate jeopardy of harm, and amassed 53 substantiated complaints for every 1,000 beds, compared with 32 per 1,000 beds at independent homes.
• Homes with related companies were fined 22 percent more often for serious health violations than independent homes, and penalties averaged $24,441 — 7 percent higher.

For-profit nursing homes utilize related corporations more frequently than nonprofits do, and have fared worse than independent for-profit homes in fines, complaints and staffing, the analysis found. Their fines averaged $25,345, which was 10 percent higher than fines for independent for-profits, and the homes received 24 percent more substantiated complaints from residents. Overall staffing was 4 percent lower than at independent for-profits.

Vulnerable populations, privatization and lack of regulation do not mix.

 

[bhsmte]

Care Suffers as More Nursing Homes Feed Money Into Corporate Webs


Vulnerable populations, privatization and lack of regulation do not mix.

Nursing homes are heavily regulated. Regulations, are not the issue.

 

[ThatRobGuy]

Nursing homes have plenty of regulations, lack of regulatory measures isn't the issue when discussing nursing homes (unless you're discussing the for-profit free-for-all that insurance companies have when dealing with them).

There are a couple key factors to point out with nursing homes:

- Nurses at these facilities earn much lower salaries than they should (national average is around $46k/year). Meaning, you're not going to get the best and brightest...you're going to get the ones that couldn't land the $70k job working at the hospital or the fairly laid back environment of working as a nurse at a doctor's office. Basically, with that job, you're getting the high stress environment that would go along with being a nurse at a hospital, but you're only getting the pay of a nurse in a laid-back GP office setting. (the worst of both worlds)

- For the fancy, "luxury" nursing homes, the salaries are better for the staff, but the cost is so prohibitive that insurance doesn't want to pick up the tab for those, and the moment private pay money runs out, they go from treating you like a customer at a high end restaurant, to rushing out out the door.

- The people in the "non-medical" roles. You have assistants and orderlies that work in these places, whose job it is to deal with some difficult patients (due to the nature of the facility), but could have little to no training when it comes to dealing with certain ailments.

- Nursing homes have a very low number of MDs on-site. They're staffed with quite a few of the aforementioned nurses, but very light on actual doctors for diagnosing and providing care for certain ailments. When you're spread that thin, there's no way to give 100+ patients quality care and assessment on a 10 hour shift.

 

[bhsmte]

Nursing homes have plenty of regulations, lack of regulatory measures isn't the issue when discussing nursing homes (unless you're discussing the for-profit free-for-all that insurance companies have when dealing with them).

There are a couple key factors to point out with nursing homes:

- Nurses at these facilities earn much lower salaries than they should (national average is around $46k/year). Meaning, you're not going to get the best and brightest...you're going to get the ones that couldn't land the $70k job working at the hospital or the fairly laid back environment of working as a nurse at a doctor's office. Basically, with that job, you're getting the high stress environment that would go along with being a nurse at a hospital, but you're only getting the pay of a nurse in a laid-back GP office setting. (the worst of both worlds)

- For the fancy, "luxury" nursing homes, the salaries are better for the staff, but the cost is so prohibitive that insurance doesn't want to pick up the tab for those, and the moment private pay money runs out, they go from treating you like a customer at a high end restaurant, to rushing out out the door.

- The people in the "non-medical" roles. You have assistants and orderlies that work in these places, whose job it is to deal with some difficult patients (due to the nature of the facility), but could have little to no training when it comes to dealing with certain ailments.

- Nursing homes have a very low number of MDs on-site. They're staffed with quite a few of the aforementioned nurses, but very light on actual doctors for diagnosing and providing care for certain ailments. When you're spread that thin, there's no way to give 100+ patients quality care and assessment on a 10 hour shift.

Yep. I have been in hundreds of nursing homes and you nailed it.