California Elder Law Attorney Blog

A recent report issued by the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) has found that nearly all nursing homes in the U.S. have received citations for health and safety violations in 2009. The inspector general of DHHS, federal investigators inspected and evaluated complaints from the nation's 15,000 nursing homes.

Of these facilities, roughly 67 percent are "for-profit" homes, 27 percent are nonprofit companies and 6 percent are owned by the government.

The results of this nationwide inspection found that 94 percent of for-profit facilities and 88 percent of nonprofit organizations received citations for non-compliance last year says Los Angeles Nursing Home Abuse and Neglect Attorney Steven C. Peck.

In addition to calculating the percentage of homes violating federal standards, this investigation also looked into the amounts and types of violations occurring at particular homes.

These analyses found that:

• On average, 8 violations occurred at each non-compliant for-profit facility in 2009.
• About 6 violations occurred at each non-compliant nonprofit and government home in 2009.

In most cases, violations cited by federal inspectors consisted of any combination of:

• Infected bed sores
• Malnutrition
• Medication mishaps
• Patient abuse (either psychological or physical)
• Patient neglect

DHHS investigators contend that lack of adequately trained nursing home staff is primarily responsible for such rampant and disturbing nursing home violations. This contention is supported by the fact that independent researchers have found that having a higher ratio of staff to patients typically results in better care for the patients indicates San diego Nursing Home Abuse and neglect lawyer Steven C. Peck.

Medicare Violations at Nursing Homes

Along with finding such inhumane abuses, the DHHS report also uncovered the fact that some nursing homes were guilty of stealing funds from Medicare and Medicaid - as the facilities were billing these programs for services they didn't provide or provided extremely deficiently.