Threats of Understaffed Nursing Homes

Many nursing home facilities are extremely understaffed that they might be endangering the welfare of the patients; this is according to a report by federal health authorities. The report suggests more stringent recommendations that will require thousands of nursing facilities to employ more nurses and nurses’ aides.

According to several studies, under-staffing in nursing homes has led to many issues in patient’s condition like severe bedsores, abnormal weight loss, and malnutrition. It is, of course, hard to maintain the welfare of the seniors if a facility lacks manpower. It has been reported that a huge amount of patients have developed life-threatening infections that could have been avoided if there is proper staffing. 

The US government has already made several vital steps to resolve the issue. It suggests new federal standards to ensure that patients receive no less than two hours of care every day from nursing aides, amongst other things, there must be sufficient amount of nurses and other health professional within the facility. The research states that 54 % of nursing facilities presently fall underneath the suggested minimum standard. This is very threatening, given that it may endanger the life of the senior.

Studies suggest that patients receive only a minimum of 12 minutes each day of care from nurses. Presently, 31 percent of nursing facilities don’t meet that standard amount of nurses. Though the government has intentions in resolving the problem, it is still impossible for the government to propose minimum staffing recommendations since they were supplying insufficient subsidies under Medicare insurance and State Medicaid programs. Many senior care authorities explained that it is also hard to attract and retain good employees because of the status of the economy. Making the job appealing for nurses and developing a program will increase the quality of healthcare service that our seniors will receive in a nursing home. 

Neglect in Nursing Homes

Many of today’s nursing homes are managed by thoughtless and selfish business people whose main objective is pleasing their investors. They are compensated with nice incomes and rewards for team cutting and other cost-cutting methods. Profits are spent in powerful lobbying groups that enjoy effective influence over law makers and authorities. These organizations respond to medical negligence legal cases, not with training learned and corporate mandate to improve care, but with tort change, introduced and passed into law by greedy and recompensed congress. Eighty percent of the sector’s payments come from community funds, Medical health insurance and State health programs and we are not getting our entire worth.

nursing_homesHealth and Human Services revealed that medical health insurance paid $5.1 billion dollars for poor elderly care facility care in 2009. Harmless repercussions of poor care have taught this market that it’s more profitable to offer poor care and pay an occasional fine than it is to hire and train staff to offer proper care. Sequestration cuts are further weakening the bite of regulating agencies that view themselves as in “partnership” with the very market they’re charged with watching. Charges are meager, inconsistently gathered and do not act as preventives.

Silence and inaction are daily pointers that our community doesn’t want to think about old individuals suffering neglect and abuse in nursing. Even organizations with “aging” and “health care” in their titles don’t want to cross the nursing-home limit. The realities of life and death in nursing homes are too dark and our man’s instinct surrenders to more enjoyable matters. Accounts of abuse are as ignored as the sufferers themselves and reform supporters are continuously advised they can’t force individuals to good care. There are no children or pet dogs or cats to save in these experiences. They are old individuals who can no longer protect and defend themselves. Unfortunately, the number of individuals willing to rebel against this highly effective profit-motivated industry continues to be low. This is why true change and proper care remain out of our reach. We simply need more individuals to care and to be counted.

Nursing Homes Quality

Ohio tax payers are paying large numbers to nursing homes that don’t succeed to fulfill minimum state specifications for looking after their citizens, falling short of a bar many say is too low. Even three nursing homes on a government watch list for high numbers of inadequacies over long periods, two in Cincinnati and one in Youngstown, met Ohio’s quality measures, which give a passing quality even if a service flunks 75% of state specifications. In all, $12.7 million was invested to take good care of sufferers living in nursing homes that did not achieve at least five of 20 measures for great quality care, according to research for the financial year that ended June 30 from the Ohio Department of Medicaid. Still, less than 1% fell short of that standard, only nine of the 926 nursing homes. One has since closed. None is in central Ohio.

nursing_homes“We’ve got some good signs, but the floor is so low everybody can fulfill those,” said Robert Applebaum, home of the Ohio Long-term Care Research Project at Miami University. He also served on the advisory board that released suggestions to congress for enhancing care. “We need to do a better job of getting rid of bad-quality homes, but we also need to do a better job of reimbursing the high-quality homes.”

Medicaid, which provides coverage of health to poor and impaired Ohioans, will pay for approximately 70% of nursing-home care in the state. On average, the federal-state program includes about 58,200 long-term-care citizens. Last year, in an effort to improve institutional care, the state started demanding features to fulfill at least five of 20 high quality measures to earn a full State Medicaid programs payment, which earnings $165 a day per person. The measures include giving citizens meal options, enabling them to choose when they get up and go to bed and the opportunity to customize their bedrooms. The nine nursing homes unable to fulfill the mark lost 10% of the payment, or nearly $16.50 of the per-resident daily subsidy. Those funds are to be allocated to the more than 900 facilities meeting the standard.

Nursing Home Inspections

In reaction to a Freedom of Information Act demand by ProPublica, the government has launched unredacted write-ups of issues discovered during nursing home examinations around the country. We’re making them available these days for anyone who wants to obtain the complete editions. For several weeks now, ProPublica has made redacted editions of this same information available in an easily retrievable format in our Nursing Home Inspect device. These editions, which are posted on the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services website, Nursing Home Inspect, sometimes empty out patients’ age groups, health circumstances, schedules and recommended medicines.

nursing_homesThe organization has said the redactions are designed to balance individual comfort issues with the need to notify customers about the quality of care. ProPublica asked for the unredacted reviews because they are public records and because the included information can make them more useful. For example, prescribed information in the unredacted write-ups can help recognize situations in which sufferers obtained medicines such as antipsychotics that are risky for those with dementia.

Sufferers and workers are not determined in either the redacted or unredacted reviews. Nursing Home Inspect allows patients and their loved ones to recognize nursing homes in their states and recognize those with serious inadequacies and charges in the last three years. The entire national collection of reviews, record more than 267,000 inadequacies in nursing homes nationwide, is retrievable by keyword and key phrase. At this point, Nursing Home Inspect is constantly on the link to only the redacted examination reviews. To search through the unredacted editions, you’ll have to obtain them and use a program like Microsoft Excel or a text manager that enables you to search for keywords and phrases.

Obamacare and Nursing Homes

Since the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act were approved this summer, states and many rights groups have been disagreeing about the benefits and drawbacks. The impact the act has on elderly people due to Medicaid/Medicare reduces, as well as its impact on nursing homes, are both popular issues. Many senior rights groups were passionate about the latest regulation, declaring it permitted them to acquire more advantages from State health programs and Medical health insurance. Max Richtman, head of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security & Medicare, assured people they would “get more and pay less for it.”

The decreasing of medicine prices for those with Medical health insurance is a plus, but where are the other benefits? With a loss of $716 billion dollars for Medical health insurance, President Barack Obama’s using a double-edged blade on elderly people, as medical centers have to downsize employees to afford budget and wage reduces. This does allow elderly people in medical centers and nursing homes to have the same advantages with lower costs and insurance deductibles. However, there will not be enough staff to care for the sick and injured, which in the end will fuel the two main causes of occurrences in nursing homes right now, the shifting of sufferers to different facilitations, as well as abuse and disregard.

One of the latest problems for sick and injured elderly people is their treatment in nursing homes. California has come under fire during modern times due to many undercover reviews exposing the true characteristics of these features and lack of care being provided. Will the new reduces to State Medicaid programs and Medical health insurance under Obamacare aid our elderly people, especially those in nursing homes? With needing health insurance coverage, yet less financing to offer the advantages and financing to the programs, there is a connection between the ongoing inadequate care of these sufferers, especially in the conglomerate unfortunately that the nursing facilitation market has turned into.