Nursing Home Care Deficient
Posted by Patti on July 6th, 2006 / Print This Post
I saw this article at the Boston Globe the other day and was going to post it, but it’s gone. Found it at Red Orbit though.
Tens of thousands of nursing home residents must be sent to the hospital each year because of a breakdown in basic medical care at the facilities, specialists say, a scenario that exposes frail elderly people to unnecessary trauma and illness.More than one-third of all hospitalizations of nursing home residents could be prevented if nursing staff recognized symptoms of increasing illness sooner and doctors were more readily available at the nursing homes, a new national study said.
“Things get overlooked until a hospitalization is unavoidable,” said Mary E. McKenna, the state’s chief consumer advocate for nursing home residents. “The quality of primary care . . . has not been up to what people expect.”
Now, there is a growing movement in Massachusetts and elsewhere to strengthen medical care at nursing homes and cut unnecessary hospitalizations.
A New Bedford nursing home began using telemedicine a month ago to give patients immediate access to doctors evenings and weekends. HealthBridge Management, which owns the nursing home, plans to expand the videophone doctor visits to many of its 14 other Massachusetts nursing homes over the next year. Already, the program has averted at least six trips to the emergency room.
More nursing homes are hiring nurse practitioners, some on call 24 hours a day, to provide intensive, hands-on primary care. Many of the nurse practitioners work with Evercare, a for-profit Medicare HMO that serves 6,300 nursing home residents in Massachusetts and tens of thousands more nationwide. A national study of Evercare’s impact on nearly 2,000 patients over two years found a 65 percent reduction in preventable hospitalizations. Evercare also pays doctors more than the typical rate, and its physicians see patients more often than average.
The state is targeting four conditions that frequently result in avoidable hospitalizations — dehydration, urinary tract infections, chronic pulmonary disease, and congestive heart failure. At workshops cosponsored by the state trade group for nursing facilities, nurses and aides are taught to identify subtle changes in patients’ health that may signal a developing problem and to intervene quickly and effectively.
Read the
rest of this article, there is much more. Very interesting stuff and so familiar.
July 7th, 2006 at 7:47 am
Good article. hmmmm do you think maybe 2 hours or less care per patient by the CNAs might just be part of the problem? Maybe if we spent more time with them we would be more intune to changes in their condition? But Medicare would rather pay for ER visits and hospital care than increase the hours of CNA to patient ratio. But what do we know? We are only taking care of them.
Mary
August 16th, 2006 at 11:40 am
if there own family doesnt want to take care of them what gives them a right to say what is good or bad .. I get tired of hearing all the sad stories i have worked in a nursing home for over 12 years let us try to last at home more then in a nursing home i can do better one on one the 10 or 12 to one. I would rather be in a person home giving the care but some just cant afford it or dont have a family who gives a damn.
October 7th, 2006 at 2:58 pm
OK Tammy this is working…LOL looks GOOD.