What Data Is Available To You In Your Search For The Best Nursing Home For Your Family Member?

The ratio of aides/nurses to residents may be one aide for fifteen residents and it is not unusual to find a lone nurse or aide caring for as many as thirty residents in a nursing home. The low staffing will result in poor quality of care, such as malnutrition of residents, bedsores, urinary tract infections, residents confined to their chairs or bed and neglect.

The New York State Department of Health measures performance rankings of all nursing homes in New York at the Department of Health’s Nursing Home Profile at www.nursinghomes.nyhealth.gov/nh-quality. For each quality measure, the nursing homes in New York are divided into five groups according to their scores with roughly 20% of the nursing homes in each group.

The quality performance rankings show how the nursing homes rank in relation to other nursing homes in New York. There are performance rankings for the percentage of residents with urinary tract infections, the percentage of residents who were physically restrained, the percentage of residents who have pressure sores, the percentage of residents who lose too much weight, and the percentage of residents who have had a catheter inserted and left in their bladder.

Medicare also provides performance rankings of nursing homes at www.Medicare/gov.NHCompare. At this useful website, Medicare lists specific information for nursing homes throughout the United States concerning nursing home staffing, quality measures, and health inspections, and you can compare up to three nursing homes in each category.

Make sure you take advantage of these websites in your search for the best nursing home for your loved one.

If you have questions, I welcome your phone call on my toll-free cell at 866-889-6882 or you can send your question by e-mail to me at jfisher@fishermalpracticelaw.com . Please don’t hesitate to request my free book, The Seven Deadly Mistakes of Malpractice Victims, if you want to learn more about nursing home negligence.