Keeping watch

A program designed to speak for residents of long-term care facilities is hobbled by the usual malady: insufficient funding.

Anyone who has seen a loved one or close friend experience life in a nursing home or assisted living facility — from a brief period of recuperation to a terminal residence — knows the special anxiety that settles on you whenever you walk out the door at the end of a visit: It is a mix of the sincere hope that it is the safest place for them, and the nagging terror that not enough attention is being paid.

A new report from the state branch of AARP, unfortunately, gives ample fuel to the second part of that combination. The advocacy group’s analysis of the work of the state’s Long-Term Care Ombudsman Program, a federally mandated oversight program designed to help elderly residents resolve complaints lodged against their caretakers — to advocate, mediate, educate and refer, as its website notes — shows evidence of significant gaps in this particular safety net.

As the Times Union’s Raga Justin recently reported, the state Office for the Aging found that a majority of longterm care facilities did not receive a single visit from anyone affiliated with the ombudsman program in a threemonth period from April through June 2022. And less than 10 percent received a weekly visit from a staff member or volunteer affiliated with the program. If you think that’s holding the program to an excessively high standard, be advised that’s the yardstick the program set for itself.

In the 10-county greater Capital Region, the AARP report suggests the program is even more threadbare: Across 103 facilities, less than 5 percent received a weekly visit, and half received no visit at all.

This is not a new phenomenon. A 2019 audit by state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli’s office that looked at three years’ worth of data found that residents had limited access to the ombudsman program due to low staffing and a reliance on volunteers. While volunteer service in aiding the elderly and infirm is always commendable, this is a clear case of the state getting what it pays for — that is, not enough. New York currently pays out roughly $4 million annually to support the program. Gov. Kathy Hochul’s executive budget proposal does not add much to that sum, which in a state with 1,400 facilities to be monitored seems woefully inadequate. Advocates including AARP want to see that sum boosted by $15 million to support the hiring of 250 full-time employees for the ombudsman program — around one ombudsman for every five facilities.

If the COVID -19 pandemic has taught us any lesson that reaches across party lines, it’s that long-term care facilities are shockingly vulnerable — to infection as well as to staffing shortages that can hamper the safe operation of even the most well-intentioned staff and management. The ombudsman program was intended to function as the classic canary in the coal mine, in league with a genuinely robust state and local regimen of inspections.

But without sufficient resources to serve some of our society’s most vulnerable, that warning signal might as well be a muffled doorbell that no one is ringing.