CMS Releases Plan to Improve Nursing Home Quality of Care

The “2008 Action Plan for Further Improvement of Nursing Home Quality” is designed to improve the quality of nursing homes, along with the access to information about long-term care.

One improvement CMS intends to make involves “consumer awareness and assistance.” Providing relevant, easy-to-read information to individuals requiring care, as well as to their family or other caregivers, will allow them to be informed members of their own health care decisions. It will also allow them to make educated choices to ensure a higher quality of care. These new informational documents will be available at www.medicare.gov. The “Guide to Nursing Homes” and “Compare” data have already been posted, and can provide valuable information about the Medicare nursing home benefits, as well as about specific nursing homes, to beneficiaries and their families.

A second focus of CMS is “survey, standards, and enforcement improvement.” According to CMS, they intend to improve the effectiveness of nursing home surveys as well as the investigation of complaints. Additionally, they are striving to improve enforcement methods.
CMS is also looking at “quality improvement.” By focusing on several specific areas, they intend to improve the quality of care in nursing homes across the country. Two significant areas of concerns include reducing the occurrences of preventable pressure ulcers and reducing the use of unnecessary physical restraints. Although CMS has already been working towards improvements in these areas, there are a number of States in which nursing homes exceed the national average in pressure sore occurrences and uses of physical restraints. By addressing these concerns, as well as others (such as developing individualized care plans), the quality of care afforded to individuals in nursing homes should be significantly improved.

Finally, CMS is working towards “quality through partnership.” They believe that in order to ensure wide-spread quality of care in nursing homes, they need to coordinate the efforts of a number of principals, including beneficiaries and their families, health care providers, purchasers (such as CMS, States, Private/public health care plans, and individual purchasers), quality improvement organizations, educational organizations, legal rights organizations, and law enforcement. When all members are working towards a common goal, quality will improve. There are a number of ways a variety of individuals, organizations, and institutions can be involved. For instance, CMS will be collaborating with over 20 national organizations in order to run a national nursing home campaign entitled “Advancing Excellence in America’s Nursing Homes.” This campaign is intended to improve both the measurement of quality of care, as well as the quality of care itself. Specifically, it will focus on a number of goals, like reducing high risk pressure sores and physical restraints, improving pain management, setting individualized quality improvement targets, assessing satisfaction of residents and/or families, measuring staff turnover (and working to reduce this), and making it possible for residents to be regularly cared for by the same caregiver.

Through these measures, CMS expects to see a notable improvement in quality of care across the country. To find out more, the official document containing the “2008 Action Plan for Further Improvement of Nursing Home Quality” can be downloaded from http://www.cms.hhs.gov/CertificationandComplianc/12_NHs.asp#TopOfPage