Choosing a nursing home for yourself or a loved one can feel like a daunting task – especially when the decision is prompted by a health crisis.
Before making a final pick, experts recommend consumers evaluate potential facilities based on quality of care, services offered, cost, location and other factors.
One tool that can help narrow down the decision is the Care Compare dashboard by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).
The federal website provides the following information for each of Utah’s 97 nursing homes:
- An overall rating from one to five stars, with higher star ratings indicating better performance on health inspections, staffing and quality measures.
- Recent inspection reports detailing citations issued by federal regulators.
- Federal fines levied against a facility in the last three years.
- An icon indicating whether the facility has recently been cited for issues related to abuse.
- Whether the nursing home has been deemed a Special Focus Facility, meaning it has a history of serious quality issues and is subject to more frequent inspections and penalties.
- Staffing details, including the average number of nurse staff hours per resident per day and staff turnover percentages.
- Data on short-stay and long-stay quality measures.
- Details on fire safety inspections and emergency preparedness.
- Ownership information, including the ownership type (for-profit, nonprofit, etc.) and whether the nursing home is part of a chain.
Users also have the option of doing a side-by-side comparison of two to three different nursing homes.
CMS notes that its star ratings can provide “important information and help you compare nursing homes” but shouldn’t be a substitute for visiting a facility.
The federal agency has put together a list of what to ask during a scheduled site visit, including questions about safety, care, staffing and preventing abuse.
CMS also recommends talking to current residents and their family members during a visit and looking out “for signs that staff are slow to respond to issues, strong odors, residents calling out, or safety risks (like residents walking around unsupervised).”
The National Consumer Voice for Quality Long-Term Care, a national group that advocates for better conditions in nursing homes across the country, advises paying particular attention to the number of Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA) staffing hours, “since CNAs provide 90% of the hands-on resident care.”
It says high levels of RN staffing are also an important marker of quality.
“Research has shown over and over and over again that if you do not have enough staff available in a facility to provide care for people, the care suffers,” said Lori Smetanka, the executive director of the National Consumer Voice for Quality Long-Term Care, in a recent interview with FOX 13 News.
For a step-by-step guide to CMS’s Care Compare tool, watch the video above.
Read more from FOX 13’s ongoing coverage of Utah’s long-term care industry here: