scholarly journals An Ecological Analysis of Quality Ratings and Inspections Associated with COVID-19 Outbreaks in Skilled Nursing Homes

Author(s):  
M.D. Simon ◽  
S.D. Meshkat ◽  
N. Raja

Objectives: As COVID-19 spread across the United States, and most rapidly in skilled nursing homes, public health departments developed policies to mitigate the spread. Concerns grew over whether this spread linked to nursing home quality. Design: We collected data on nursing home quality, staffing, and COVID-19 cases from the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services. Demographic data was sourced from Long Term Care Focus. Settings and Participants: The analysis used cross-sectional data from 1,025 California skilled nursing homes including quality ratings and confirmed COVID-19 cases between May 17, 2020 and August 23, 2020. Methods: The dependent variable was confirmed COVID-19 cases among residents. The primary independent variables were Overall Rating and Health Inspection Rating, while also including nursing home beds, patient race composition, ownership and geographic classification. Results: 5-Star Overall Rating, 5-Star Health Inspection Rating, and a lower count of health inspection deficiencies each predicted a lower likelihood of having a confirmed COVID resident case (p<.05). Conclusions and Implications: Skilled nursing homes with higher quality ratings and fewer health inspection deficiencies were less likely to have a confirmed case of COVID-19 among residents.

1990 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
David W. Bentley

Persons age 65 and over constitute the largest reservoir of Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection in the United States today. During 1987, 6,150 tuberculosis cases were reported among this high-risk group. These cases represent 27% of the total US tuberculosis morbidity, although this age group constitutes only 12% of the US population. Tuberculosis case rates in the United States are higher among the elderly (20.6 per 100,000) than among all other age groups (average 9.3 per 100,000).More Americans live in nursing homes than in any other type of residential institution; on any given day approximately 5% of all elderly persons are living in a nursing home. Elderly nursing home residents are at greater risk for tuberculosis than elderly persons living in the community. In a Centers for Disease Control (CDC)-sponsored survey of 15,379 routinely-reported tuberculosis cases from 29 states, 8% of the 4,919 cases that occurred among elderly persons occurred among residents of nursing homes. The incidence of tuberculosis among nursing home residents was 39.2 per 100,000 person years, whereas the incidence of tuberculosis among elderly persons living in the community was 21.5 per 100,000. The observed rate of tuberculosis among nursing home employees was three times the rate expected in employed adults of similar age, race and sex (CDC, unpublished data).


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 679-679
Author(s):  
Latarsha Chisholm ◽  
Akbar Ghiasi ◽  
Justin Lord ◽  
Robert Weech-Maldonado

Abstract Racial/ethnic disparities have been well documented in long-term care literature. Culture change is a movement to transition nursing homes to more home-like environments to improve the quality of care for all residents. The purpose of this study was to examine how the involvement of culture change initiatives among high Medicaid facilities was associated with nursing home quality. The study relied on both survey and secondary nursing home data for the years 2017-2018. The sample included high Medicaid facilities. The final model consisted of an ordinal logistic regression. High-Medicaid nursing homes with six or more years in culture change initiatives had higher odds of having a higher star rating, while facilities with one year or less had significantly lower odds of having a higher star rating. Culture change initiatives may require some time to effectively implement, but these initiatives are potential mechanisms to improve quality in high Medicaid nursing homes.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 852-853
Author(s):  
Xiao Qiu ◽  
Jane Straker ◽  
Katherine Abbott

Abstract Official complaints are one tool for addressing nursing home quality concerns in a timely manner. Similar to trends nationwide, the Ohio Department of Health (ODH) has noticed a trend in increasing nursing home complaints and has partnered with the Scripps Gerontology Center to learn more about facilities that receive complaints. Greater understanding may lead to proactive approaches to addressing and preventing issues. This study relies on two years of statewide Ohio nursing home complaint data. Between 2018 and 2019, the average complaint rate per 100 residents went from 6.59 to 7.06, with more than 70% of complaints unsubstantiated. Complaint information from 629 Ohio nursing homes in 2018 was linked with Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Nursing Home Compare data, the Ohio Biennial Survey of Long-Term Care Facilities, and Ohio Nursing Home Resident and Family Satisfaction Surveys. Using ordered logistic regression analyses, we investigated nursing home providers' characteristics using different levels of complaints and substantiated complaints. Findings suggest that providers with higher complaint rates are located in urban areas, had administrator and/or director of nursing (DON) turnover in the previous 3 years, experienced decreased occupancy rates, had reduced nurse aide retention, and received lower family satisfaction scores. Additionally, providers with administrator and/or DON turnover, and low family satisfaction scores are more likely to have substantiated complaints. Because increasing numbers of complaints are accompanied by relatively low substantiation rates, policy interventions targeted to specific types of providers may improve the cost-effectiveness of complaint resolution, as well as the quality of care.


2020 ◽  
Vol 118 (1) ◽  
pp. e2015455118
Author(s):  
M. Keith Chen ◽  
Judith A. Chevalier ◽  
Elisa F. Long

Nursing homes and other long-term care facilities account for a disproportionate share of COVID-19 cases and fatalities worldwide. Outbreaks in US nursing homes have persisted despite nationwide visitor restrictions beginning in mid-March. An early report issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention identified staff members working in multiple nursing homes as a likely source of spread from the Life Care Center in Kirkland, WA, to other skilled nursing facilities. The full extent of staff connections between nursing homes—and the role these connections serve in spreading a highly contagious respiratory infection—is currently unknown given the lack of centralized data on cross-facility employment. We perform a large-scale analysis of nursing home connections via shared staff and contractors using device-level geolocation data from 50 million smartphones, and find that 5.1% of smartphone users who visited a nursing home for at least 1 h also visited another facility during our 11-wk study period—even after visitor restrictions were imposed. We construct network measures of connectedness and estimate that nursing homes, on average, share connections with 7.1 other facilities. Traditional federal regulatory metrics of nursing home quality are unimportant in predicting outbreaks, consistent with recent research. Controlling for demographic and other factors, a home’s staff network connections and its centrality within the greater network strongly predict COVID-19 cases.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Shen

AbstractThe COVID-19 pandemic has been particularly deadly for residents of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities. This paper analyzes COVID-19 deaths at nursing homes during the first wave of the pandemic in the United States during the spring and early summer 2020. By combining data on facility-level COVID-19 deaths during this period with data on the neighborhoods where nursing home staff reside for a sample of eighteen states, this paper finds that staff neighborhood characteristics were a large and significant predictor of COVID-19 nursing home deaths. Even after controlling for the county where a facility is located, one standard deviation increases in average staff neighborhood (Census tract) population density, public transportation use, and non-white share were associated with 1.3 (p < .001), 1.4 (p<.001), and 0.9 (p<.001) additional deaths per 100 beds, respectively. These effects are larger than all facility management or quality variables, and larger than the effect of the nursing home’s own neighborhood characteristics. These results suggest COVID-19 outbreaks in staff communities can have large consequences for the facilities where they work, even in highly-rated facilities, and that disparities in nursing home outbreaks may be related to differences in the types of neighborhoods nursing home staff live in.


Author(s):  
Shuyan Xie ◽  
Yang Xiao ◽  
Hsiao-Hwa Chen

A nursing home provides skilled nursing care and rehabilitation services to people with illnesses, injuries or functional disabilities, but most facilities serve the elderly. Nursing homes provide various services for different residents’ needs, including daily care, assistance for the mentally disabled, and drug rehabilitation. The levels of care and quality of care provided by nursing homes have increased significantly over the past decade. The trend is toward continuous quality development and resident satisfaction; therefore, healthcare technology plays a significant role in nursing home operations. This article discusses general information about current nursing home conditions and systems in the United States and explores how technology and e-health help improve the nursing home development based on the present needs and trends. The authors also report on Thomasville Nursing Home, discussing current trends in nursing home technologies.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 735-736
Author(s):  
Lei Yu ◽  
Xiao Qiu ◽  
Tara Rose

Abstract The Covid-19 pandemic has brought terrible difficulties to nursing homes, as they were locations with the highest number of confirmed Covid-19 cases and deaths in the US. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) applies the Five-Star Quality Ratings to indicate the quality of care in nursing homes based on health inspection survey, staffing, and resident outcome. Studies to date have contradictory findings regarding the relationship between nursing home reported Quality Ratings and Covid-19 cases and deaths based on US regional data. The purpose of this study is to examine whether nursing homes’ Quality Ratings were related to the total number of resident Covid-19 cases and deaths at the US National level. The study examined US nursing homes (N=13,494) linked with CMS Nursing Home Compare data and Covid-19 Nursing Home data. Using multiple linear regression analyses, results showed nursing home Quality Ratings were significantly associated with Covid-19 residents’ cases and deaths controlling for ownership type, size, occupation rate, and years of operation (p&lt;.001; p&lt;.001). Five-star nursing homes were less likely to have Covid-19 cases and deaths. Further, comparing lower Star Ratings nursing homes, 1-Star nursing homes showed no significant difference to 2-Star and 3-Star nursing homes when examining Covid-19 cases and deaths. Overall, the Five-Star Quality Ratings is a useful measure when investigating nursing homes’ performance during the Covid-19 pandemic. Future policymakers and administrators should also focus on nursing homes with lower star ratings when improving the quality of nursing homes, particularly with regard to resident health.


Author(s):  
Matteo Lippi Bruni ◽  
Irene Mammi ◽  
Rossella Verzulli

In developed countries, the role of public authorities as financing bodies and regulators of the long-term care sector is pervasive and calls for well-planned and informed policy actions. Poor quality in nursing homes has been a recurrent concern at least since the 1980s and has triggered a heated policy and scholarly debate. The economic literature on nursing home quality has thoroughly investigated the impact of regulatory interventions and of market characteristics on an array of input-, process-, and outcome-based quality measures. Most existing studies refer to the U.S. context, even though important insights can be drawn also from the smaller set of works that covers European countries. The major contribution of health economics to the empirical analysis of the nursing home industry is represented by the introduction of important methodological advances applying rigorous policy evaluation techniques with the purpose of properly identifying the causal effects of interest. In addition, the increased availability of rich datasets covering either process or outcome measures has allowed to investigate changes in nursing home quality properly accounting for its multidimensional features. The use of up-to-date econometric methods that, in most cases, exploit policy shocks and longitudinal data has given researchers the possibility to achieve a causal identification and an accurate quantification of the impact of a wide range of policy initiatives, including the introduction of nurse staffing thresholds, price regulation, and public reporting of quality indicators. This has helped to counteract part of the contradictory evidence highlighted by the strand of works based on more descriptive evidence. Possible lines for future research can be identified in further exploration of the consequences of policy interventions in terms of equity and accessibility to nursing home care.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 523-523
Author(s):  
Andrew DeMott ◽  
Susan Hughes ◽  
Michael Gelder ◽  
Sage Kim

Abstract Investigators at the University of Illinois Chicago, the Illinois Department on Aging (IDOA), the Illinois Department of Public Health, and the Health and Medicine Policy Research Group are collaborating to examine comparative rates of Covid-19-related deaths among older adults who reside in nursing homes vs. the community in Illinois. As a first step, we have examined data from the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office to compare nursing home resident fatalities to those who died in the community. Deaths with Covid-19 listed as primary or secondary cause of death that occurred between January 1, 2020 to September 30, 2020 among older adults ages 60 and over were identified from the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office case archive file. Location at death and race/ethnicity were obtained from the same source. Location at death was matched with data in the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Covid-19 Nursing Home Data to identify persons who died in skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) as well as facility and staff characteristics. We found that the 3,937 deaths among persons over the age of 60 comprised 75% of total deaths in Cook County. Of the total older adult deaths, 2,090 (53%) died in the community and 1,837 (47%) died in SNFs. Regression analyses that controlled for CMS quality ratings found that larger, for-profit nursing homes, with high levels of staff infected with Covid-19 were associated with higher mortality. The policy implications of these findings will be discussed.


2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (5) ◽  
pp. 264-271
Author(s):  
Rachel E. López

The elderly prison population continues to rise along with higher rates of dementia behind bars. To maintain the detention of this elderly population, federal and state prisons are creating long-term care units, which in turn carry a heavy financial burden. Prisons are thus gearing up to become nursing homes, but without the proper trained staff and adequate financial support. The costs both to taxpayers and to human dignity are only now becoming clear. This article squarely addresses the second dimension of this carceral practice, that is the cost to human dignity. Namely, it sets out why indefinitely incarcerating someone with dementia or other neurocognitive disorders violates the Eighth Amendment of the United States Constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. This conclusion derives from the confluence of two lines of U.S. Supreme Court precedent. First, in Madison v. Alabama, the Court recently held that executing someone (in Madison’s case someone with dementia) who cannot rationally understand their sentence amounts to cruel and unusual punishment. Second, in line with Miller v. Alabama, which puts life without parole (LWOP) sentences in the same class as death sentences due to their irrevocability, this holding should be extended to LWOP sentences. Put another way, this article explains why being condemned to life is equivalent to death for someone whose neurodegenerative disease is so severe that they cannot rationally understand their punishment.


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