Residents in VA homes get more staff attention

USA TODAY’s misleading article, “Secret VA nursing home ratings hide poor quality care from the public,” published Sunday is a prime example of why the phrase “fake news” has gained such prominence.

Let’s start with the headline. The VA publicly released these nursing home ratings on June 12. Calling them “secret” is false and irresponsible. So is this paper’s focus on a single, cherrypicked sub-metric — rather than overall rankings — to paint a misleading picture of how our facilities actually compare with the private sector. Here are the facts:

This is the first year the Department of Veterans Affairs has compiled ratings for our nursing homes using the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services rating system. That’s why we’re now able to present an apples-toapples comparison of VA homes with private facilities.

The data show that, overall, VA’s nursing home system compares closely with the private sector, even though the department cares for sicker patients — with conditions such as prostate ob- struction, spinal cord injury, mental illness, homelessness, PTSD, combat injury and terminal illness — than do private facilities. And even though private sector nursing homes admit patients selectively, VA will not refuse service to any eligible veteran. These factors make achieving good quality ratings more challenging.

Importantly, though, VA nursing homes have a better staff-to-resident ratio than private sector facilities to ensure that residents in VA facilities get more attention from staff than do residents in private facilities.

Last year, VA committed to releasing our nursing home ratings this summer. We met that goal. And along the way, we took time to ensure that our data were accurate.

USA TODAY’s disingenuous attempt to equate these good-faith efforts to vet and organize our nursing home quality data before their release as “secrecy” does a disservice to the hundreds of thousands of VA employees and the millions of veterans who depend on them for care.