Legislature must approve nursing home regulation
The Florida nursing home industry had a summit last week to discuss carrying out a demand by Gov. Rick Scott requiring facilities to quickly install generators that can power air-conditioning systems when electricity goes out.
But judging from industry leaders’ response, this emergency order may have as little chance as similar initiatives and proposed legislation did a decade ago — and since.
“We want to work with the governor,” Florida Health Care Association spokeswoman Kristen Knapp said. “We know he has good intentions.”
Faint praise, indeed.
Scott’s directive gives nursing homes and assisted-living facilities 60 days to acquire generators and fuel that can last for 96 hours after power goes out. A big issue is the cost of adding generators, as experts put the price tag at an average of $350,000 for a 120bed nursing home.
This led to some choice words from the Florida Health Care Association and LeadingAge Florida, the groups hosting the summit, such as “alarming” and “impractical, if not impossible.”
We agree that it seems a big ask. But the governor and state lawmakers must stick to their guns on this because, quite frankly, it should have been done already.
It shouldn’t have taken the tragic deaths of 11 elderly people sweltering in a Hollywood rehab center to wake state health care officials to the repercussions of their lax regulatory approach to nursing homes, rehab centers and assisted-living facilities.
Though long-term care industry apologists have sought to paint the Broward County tragedy as an isolated incident, the industry’s image is taking a drubbing over it. And rightfully so.
The Post’s Joe Capozzi reported how a Greenacres nursing home worker, in the aftermath of Hurricane Irma, was fired after posting Facebook requests for help to cool down elderly residents, her employers saying she put the company in an “unfavorable light.”
As we’ve said previously, lawmakers need to step up and do what they should have done in 2006, following the disastrous 2005 hurricane season that featured Wilma and Katrina. That session, a bill that would have required some nursing homes to have generators died due largely to industry opposition. A compromise bill would have set aside about $57 million to reimburse half the cost for some nursing homes that were willing to install full-service generators. It died because the Senate balked at funding.
Before the Hollywood incident, Scott hasn’t been much better. According to Mary Ellen Klas of The Miami Herald/Tampa Bay Times Tallahassee Bureau, since Scott took office in 2011, he has shown his disdain for industry oversight by, for example, quickly signing into law legislation that reduced safety protections for nursing home patients and also reducing the number of hours of direct care the patients received.
Perhaps most troubling, Klas found that during Scott’s tenure it’s become more difficult for patients’ families to monitor the quality of care. (A day after her story was published, state regulators decided to abandon the use of software that allowed them to heavily redact key words from nursing home inspection reports posted online, linking instead to more complete reports available on a federal site.)
The governor has sought to deflect blame and point fingers at the industry itself in the wake of the tragic events at the oft-troubled Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills, but it’s clear that his Agency for Health Care Administration can do some soul-searching of its own.
To be sure, ramming through generator requirements is not a panacea when it comes to making sure our most vulnerable are cared for in a disaster. The state needs to make a thorough study of evacuation and emergency management plans for Florida’s 680 nursing homes and 1,300 assisted-living facilities, as well as their place on the priority list for power restoration by utilities.
But generators are a good start.
“Whatever the facts will come out ... we just can’t wait for this investigation to go forward and do nothing,” Senate Children, Families and Elder Affairs Committee Chairman Rene Garcia, R-Hialeah, said at the summit. “It’s going to happen. We’re going to move forward with some legislation in the state of Florida having to do with generators and alternative power. It just needs to happen.”
Then make it so, senator.