In the suburbs of Seattle, federal inspectors had found the Life Care Center of Kirkland failed to properly care for ailing patients or alert authorities to a growing number of respiratory infections. At least 146 other nursing homes across the country had confirmed coronavirus cases in late March when Seema Verma, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, vowed to help “keep what happened in Kirkland from happening again.
The facilities that were cited for breakdowns often escaped significant penalties, The Post also found. But patient watchdog groups say the lack of inspection findings and significant fines undercut the agency’s ability to force change at troubled homes during the crisis.“I can’t think of one decision that CMS made properly,” said Charlene Harrington, a sociology and nursing professor at the University of California at San Francisco who has studied the industry for more than 30 years. “They just rolled over, whatever the nursing homes wanted.
“Unless the fines and penalties have teeth and significance, [nursing homes] just as soon pay them and move on,” said Dean Lerner, a former assistant attorney general in Iowa who spent nearly a decade as the state’s chief health inspector and later became an enforcement consultant to CMS. For homes without strong protocols, the threat of significant federal enforcement would have prompted early, swift and sustained reform, Lerner and others said. Besides the lack of inspection findings and fines, CMS in March temporarily suspended the collection of all penalties.
“CMS approach to enforcement during the pandemic has been terribly wrongheaded,” said Mike Dark, an attorney at the California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform. “It signals to facilities that there will be no business cost and no consequences if you get it wrong.
In February, the California Department of Veterans Affairs created a 37-step risk reduction plan that addressed staff training and the prevention of communicable diseases. The department cares for 2,100 residents across eight homes, including 800 in skilled nursing. Since March, two residents and one employee have died of covid-19, the department said.
“We’re going to put all inspection resources, at the state level, focused on infectious disease, looking at nursing homes being a focal point of vulnerability,” Vice PresidentThree weeks later, Verma announced the findings of the inspection at the Life Care Center in Kirkland. CMS, she said, had enhanced the infection-control inspections, adding in guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and targeting homes in hard-hit regions.
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Source: Forbes - 🏆 394. / 53 Read more »
Source: NPRHealth - 🏆 144. / 63 Read more »
Source: CNN - 🏆 4. / 95 Read more »
Source: WSJ - 🏆 98. / 63 Read more »
Source: USATODAY - 🏆 100. / 63 Read more »