Guest Editorial:
More nursing home oversight needed.
Just when more eyes are needed on nursing home safety, Florida is pulling the covers over inspection reports once available for all to see.
The recent deaths of 14 patients from a Hollywood nursing home call for greater oversight of Florida’s nearly 700 nursing homes, not less. Yet as part of its response to this scandal, Gov. Rick Scott’s administration is making it harder for you to access nursing home incident reports, death investigations and facility inspection reports.
At the same time, county officials are refusing to release — or are heavily redacting — the emergency response plans nursing homes are supposed to create and test before storm season. So if you want to know where your mother would go if her nursing home had to evacuate, forget about it. That’s now confidential.
Given the shaken confidence in nursing homes, Scott should welcome the public’s eyeballs on public records. Yet the Miami Herald reported recently that Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration, which oversees nursing homes, has scrubbed its website of inspection reports, death investigations and other records you once could access online.
You can still request hard copies, but be prepared for delays. Also, be prepared to pay a fee for someone to black out words like bruises, falls, accidentally and roaches.
In this digital age, there is no good reason to prevent Floridians from accessing information online. Let’s remember, some people may not be able to get to the courthouse or state health department. And some may not know exactly what to request or have the money to pay for reports.
You almost get the sense that today’s “public servants” don’t want the public to see what’s in these reports. Maybe that’s because they might contain slip-ups.
After the deaths at the Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills, the Herald found the facility’s emergency management plan failed to address how patients would be kept cool during a power outage. The home also described its June 2017 hurricane drill exactly the same as its October 2016 drill, down to the same mangled syntax, “suggesting the rehab center copy-pasted one year’s documentation to the next without making any changes,” the Herald reported.
Is this why Broward and Palm Beach counties now refuse to release more emergency plans to the Herald? Incredibly, they say their hands are tied by a state law designed to protect public spaces from terrorists.
Seriously? They really think terrorists are plotting to raid your mother’s room if she’s evacuated for a hurricane?
If people could see those plans, they could help spot issues and raise important questions. In making important decisions about a nursing home, people want to see what’s happening in nursing homes, not rely on a marketer’s sales pitch or the one-to-four-stars guide of rubber-stamp regulators.
Patients’ names can be redacted from reports to protect medical privacy. What’s important is knowing if they were found unclean, with bedsores and unable to eat the food before them.
Just as lawmakers plan to require nursing homes to have generators capable of powering air conditioners in emergencies, so should they also improve transparency in oversight.
Representatives of the nursing home industry want you to know the deaths at Hollywood Hills were an anomaly. They don’t want the tragedy to overshadow the good the industry did in protecting Florida’s 73,000 nursing home residents during Hurricane Irma.
If that’s the case, the Florida Health Care Association should lead the call to pull back the covers on inspection reports and welcome the sunshine in.