One of the most important and heart-wrenching decisions families make for their elderly loved ones is whether they are able to keep them in their homes as they get older and sicker.
Sometimes that is not feasible for a long list of reasons in each case.
More than 30,000 Virginians live in nursing homes.
Both the federal government and Virginia regulate them. The Virginia Department of Health, for both the Commonwealth and the federal government, inspects.
We should be able to expect patients to receive at least basic standards of care. A high percentage in Virginia have not .
In a five-star system, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) rates 98 of Virginia’s 289 nursing homes at one star – defined as much below average. More than a third.
Nationwide, only the worst 20 percent receive a one-star rating.
The last time I reported, in October of 2021, those figures were 54 one-star facilities out of 288. Nineteen percent. So some of our nursing homes have gotten precipitously worse.
The ratings are backward-looking a couple of years, so the measured declines discussed here did not start recently. By definition of the way that Medicare compiles records and assigns scores, some have been bad for a long time.
People have suffered and died from the lack of proper care and effective oversight. Continue reading