Category: Long Term Care and Nursing Homes
-
Predatory Virginia Nursing Home Owners
by James C. Sherlock Merriam Webster: Pred*a*tor: (noun) one who injures or exploits others for personal gain or profit. The most medically vulnerable of us reside in skilled nursing facilities (SNF). Nobody plans to be there, but that is where about thirty thousand Virginians find themselves at any one time. People who are moved from hospitals…
-
Past Time for Serious Sanctions for the Commonwealth’s Worst Nursing Homes
by James C. Sherlock Effective May 1 of this year, Karen Shelton M.D. became Virginia’s Health Commissioner. Dr. Shelton is now the licensor and regulator of Virginia’s nursing homes. By law, state-licensed nursing homes must comply with federal and state laws and standards. By regulation, the Health Commissioner “may impose such administrative sanctions or take such…
-
Virginia Nursing Home Regulations and Inspections – A Strategic Improvement Recommendation
By James C. Sherlock Those who read this blog know that Virginia has far more than its share of bad nursing homes. They just do not know what can or should be done about it. This third in a current series on Virginia nursing homes will take on a problem that is self-inflicted – the…
-
No New Law or Regulation is Needed for VDH to Sanction Bad Nursing Homes
By James C. Sherlock This is Part 2 of this series. Part 1 is here. I will offer here a deeper sense of Virginia’s bad nursing homes. And of the historic lack of adequate regulation by the state. Start with the fact that even the worst of them are still open. Centers for Medicare &…
-
Scandal in Plain Sight – Virginia’s Failed Regulation of Law-Avoiding Nursing Home Owners
by James C. Sherlock One of the most important and heart-wrenching decisions families make for their elderly loved ones is whether they are able to keep them in their homes as they get older and sicker. Sometimes that is not feasible for a long list of reasons in each case. More than 30,000 Virginians live…
-
The Registered Nurse Shortage
by James C. Sherlock I have reported often about the severe and increasing shortages of nurses both in Virginia and nationally. At some point in nearly everyone’s life, we literally will not be able to live without the help of a nurse, whether for injury or illness or just declining overall health. We need both…
-
New Fed Policy Would Hide CMS Data on Patient Safety Records of Hospitals
by James C. Sherlock One of the most disturbing commentaries I have read in a long time relating to federal efforts to improve hospital patient safety reports a major step backwards in that program. I have written here many times of the power of the hospitals over Virginia’s politics. A proposed new federal rule shows…
-
Medicaid, Public Health and Chronic Disease Management
by James C. Sherlock From the CDC: Chronic diseases have significant health and economic costs in the United States. Preventing chronic diseases, or managing symptoms when prevention is not possible, can reduce these costs. Virginia pays a great deal of money every year to contractors who manage the care of its Medicaid population. It is…
-
Unionize Virginia’s Worst Nursing Home Chains
by James C. Sherlock If you go back to the series of articles I published here in October of 2021, you can refresh your memory on the dangers represented by Virginia’s worst nursing home chains. If you look at the complete spreadsheet of every Virginia nursing home from that data sorted by ownership, the bad…
-
A Narrative About Virginia’s Rural Hospitals that Obscures the Facts
by James C. Sherlock Becker’s Healthcare, a widely read medical news organization, published a story on Friday, “892 hospitals at risk of closure, state by state.” Rural hospitals were the topic. It cited as its source a report from a non-profit named The Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform (CHQPR), which presents itself as…
-
Big Lessons from Government Data on Virginia’s 286 Nursing Facilities
by James C. Sherlock Nursing facilities in Virginia offer an incredible mixed bag. There are heroes and villains. Much to see here. This column will offer expansive views of government data on each of the 286 nursing facilities in this state. I found out a lot things that really matter to the quality of…
-
Nursing Home Ads Pose As Official State Advice
by James C. Sherlock The Virginia state government has a Department for Aging and Rehabilitative Services. Who wouldn’t want one of those? But in the case of recommending nursing homes, it would be better if it would either stop or fix its broken system. Which it pays a nonprofit, VirginiaNavigator, to run. It is…
-
Virginia’s Self-Inflicted Nursing Home Crisis – Part 5 – The Best facilities in Virginia
by James C. Sherlock To show you the list of nursing facilities that I would use to begin a search for one for me and my family, I have built a spreadsheet of the very best facilities in Virginia. Because they are available, I made it a true list of all stars. Five stars composite…
-
Virginia’s Self-Inflicted Nursing Home Crisis – Part 4 – the Worst Facilities in Virginia
by James C. Sherlock Today we are going to take a look today at a snapshot of Virginia’s worst nursing homes as rated by the Centers for Medicare/Medicaid services. Medicare rates 54 of the total of 288 nursing facilities in Virginia as overall one star out of five. By definition of the way that Medicare…
-
Virginia’s Self-Inflicted Nursing Home Crisis – Part 3 – McAuliffe & Herring
by James C. Sherlock In the first two parts of this series, I wrote about the shortage of state inspectors for nursing homes in the Virginia Department of Health Office of Licensure and Certification (OLC) and the continuing danger it poses to Virginia patients. The problem, unfortunately, is much wider than just nursing homes. So…