Nursing Home Abuses: Oversight of California Nursing Homes

Laura Blatt

Contributor

0 CommentsPrint ArticleSubscribe

A recent state audit criticized the California Department of Health Services (DHS) for not doing an adequate job of overseeing the quality of nursing homes. Some DHS employees overlooked or underestimated nursing home violations, the audit said. Also, the timing of inspections was quite predictable, so it was too easy for a nursing home to prepare for the visit and hide deficiencies.

The DHS often did not complete nursing home complaint investigations on time, and failed to promptly report back to the families that filed the complaints, the audit report found. Almost 50% of investigations were not begun within the legal time limit and about 39% were not completed on time.

The audit report concluded that DHS staffing shortages were partly to blame for the problems. It suggested that the DHS lend staff to those district offices with less staff, and adjust salaries to make them more competitive. It also urged the DHS to provide better training so that data was more accurate, and to conduct inspections throughout the survey cycle to reduce predictability. And finally, the state auditor urged the DHS to rethink its time consuming policy of not providing investigation results to a family until the nursing home had submitted a correction plan.