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Government Launches Nursing Home Rating System


Pennie

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Dec 18th CMS announced a new rating system for Nursing homes. Similar to the 5 Star rating system for hotels the new rating system for nursing facilities for the elderly will be a 5 star system to aid the public in choosing a Nursing Facility for their loved ones.

 

CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) unveiled an updated Web site Thursday Dec 18th, intended to make choosing a nursing home easier for elderly Americans and their families. ( http://www.cms.hhs.gov/ )

 

CMS is a excellent resource for the Elder Care industry, search the site for Surveyors Guide .. learn what the surveyors will be looking for when they enter your facility.. search f248 and f249 to find info on the federal tags that affect the Activity Directors in elder care.

 

For an administrator or owner/s of nursing, elder daycare, assisted living, specialized care, and hospital rehab centers the CMS is the source for goverment regulations.. as a rule of thumb .. if your facility accepts Medicare or Medicaid payments, then the Goverment Regulations as set by the CMS apply to you. As Activity Directors the same rule applies to you. Keep this info in mind when you are searching for answers.

Information on HIPAA (your residents privacy rights) are listed on the CMS site also.. if you have questions, then this would be the source ..

 

 

Watch the news.. there are new articles listed everyday about the new ratings.... what states have the best staffing ,. which states have the highest ratings.. worst ratings.. great topic of discussion..

 

let us hear from you ...

 

thanks, Pennie

 

 

related articles:

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...8121802098.html

http://www.mcknights.com/Nursing-homes-to-...article/122767/

Nursing Homes: 10 Best States for Overall Staffing

The health and happiness of residents and the quality and stability of staffing are

intertwined

By Avery Comarow , Megan Johnson

Posted December 19, 2008

Yesterday, the federal government rolled out a revamped and simplified approach to

its evaluations of nursing homes, in order to make the onerous task of choosing the

right one easier for families. Like the system the government uses for rating

Medicare health and drug plans, the Nursing Home Compare site now gives nursing

homes from 1 to 5 stars, overall and in each of three areas?performance in the

latest three quarterly reports in 10 key quality measures, such as the percentage of

residents with urinary tract infections; performance in the latest three annual

health inspections; and adequacy of both overall staffing and staffing by registered

nurses.

 

The following 10 states have the highest percentages of nursing homes with the best

rating of 5 stars for adequate overall staffing.

 

Rank State Total, all nursing homes 5 stars

1 Alaska 12 91.7 percent

2 Hawaii 42 35.7 percent

3 Wyoming 39 33.3 percent

4 Montana 84 29.8 percent

5 Delaware 40 27.5 percent

6 New Hampshire 75 25.3 percent

7 Washington, D.C. 18 22.2 percent

8 Maine 109 22.0 percent

9 Oregon 138 17.4 percent

10 North Dakota 81 16.1 percent

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I would be interested in hearing from other facilities about their impression of the system and how their administrative staff responded to the posting. My home received an overall rating of three stars. Initially, I was disappointed in this, because naturally I wanted five! However, in my parish and the four surrounding us, there were no five star homes, two four star homes were SNF's in hospitals and out of approximately 40 homes, there were only 4 three star homes. So in comparison, I am ok with the three. I called all of my staff together to let them know our rating, and to give them the website for them to review any other homes they were interested in. I probably have about 40% of my new families say they researched us on the CMS site. I believe this rating will be extremely important to the state surveyors but I am not sure about families in my area. Please let me know your opinion of the new rating system. :)

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Very interesting. I just did some research and looked at several ratings for a few nursing homes that I am familiar with and was a little surprised at some of the ratings. I like the simplicity of the 5 Star rating and think that more people will definitely access this kind of information online; however I think they need to elaborate more on HOW they came up with their ratings. The brief explanations from 'how we came up with this' leaves a lot more questions than answers. More people are doing their research online before taking all of the tours of communities and I think they will definitely use rating to make their decision. Good job in making the ratings available. Let's just hope a little more detail can be provided to understand the ratings.

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we just recieved our rating it was a 5 there are 5 areas we had 3 -5 and 2 -3 's There are 6 other facilities in our local area and only one other had 5's which I was surprised due to one of the nursing homes is a new facility. There were only 2 that had resident and family councils also which also surprised me. I'm not sure how much it will based on by consumers. It seems like there is getting so much for people to look it at prior to a comittement to place someone. which is a good thing.

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Dec 18th CMS announced a new rating system for Nursing homes. Similar to the 5 Star rating system for hotels the new rating system for nursing facilities for the elderly will be a 5 star system to aid the public in choosing a Nursing Facility for their loved ones.

 

CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) unveiled an updated Web site Thursday Dec 18th, intended to make choosing a nursing home easier for elderly Americans and their families. ( http://www.cms.hhs.gov/ )

 

CMS is a excellent resource for the Elder Care industry, search the site for Surveyors Guide .. learn what the surveyors will be looking for when they enter your facility.. search f248 and f249 to find info on the federal tags that affect the Activity Directors in elder care.

 

For an administrator or owner/s of nursing, elder daycare, assisted living, specialized care, and hospital rehab centers the CMS is the source for goverment regulations.. as a rule of thumb .. if your facility accepts Medicare or Medicaid payments, then the Goverment Regulations as set by the CMS apply to you. As Activity Directors the same rule applies to you. Keep this info in mind when you are searching for answers.

Information on HIPAA (your residents privacy rights) are listed on the CMS site also.. if you have questions, then this would be the source ..

 

 

Watch the news.. there are new articles listed everyday about the new ratings.... what states have the best staffing ,. which states have the highest ratings.. worst ratings.. great topic of discussion..

 

let us hear from you ...

 

thanks, Pennie

 

 

related articles:

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...8121802098.html

http://www.mcknights.com/Nursing-homes-to-...article/122767/

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In our rural area , we got a 4 star rating for two counties. One facility in each county got a 5 star rating. A neighboring county facility received 1 star only. I wonder what this is based on. IS it what residents say, families, or department of health.

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