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Show Administrators defend nursing homes against government charges By JUDY JENSEN Editor BOUNTIFUL Administrators Administra-tors of four Bountiful nursing homes disagree that the quality of their facilities can be judged on a recent Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) report. The recently released report named Care West, Life Care Center, Cen-ter, South Davis Community Hospital Hos-pital and Park View Nursing Home as being deficient in several areas of patient treatment. The study, which was conducted . between May 1987 and April 1988, reported the compliance of facilities facili-ties with 32 criteria which must be met in order to be reimbursed for the care of patients by Medicare and Medicaid. Care West did not meet seven of the 32 standards including the requirement re-quirement that: "Drugs are administered admi-nistered according to the written orders of the attending physician. ' ' Care West Administrator Dennis Gehring said "The problem with the report is that'll doesn't give you enough details to tell you what is being evaluated. He explained that in each of the 32 standards "there are as many as 15 elements. ele-ments. If you're 'out' on just one of the elements, they (the state health department) report you 'out' on the standard," he said. According to Mr. Gehring, none of the infractions reported at the four Bountiful facilities were serious. se-rious. "If there were grounds for shutting one of us down, it would have happened," he said. . Serious infractions are reported as being 'out' on a 'condition.' A condition is made up of 'standards.' 'stan-dards.' Although the goal of Care West is to have no deficiencies, Mr. Gehring said this report is an improvement im-provement from the past. "We've really improved and the better we get, the harder the inspectors have to look for infractions," he said. He added that changes have been made in each of the seven areas of concern. "We want to be totally in compliance with state standards," he said. Park View Nursing Home was judged as being deficient in three of the 32 standards. Utah State Health Department officials visited vi-sited the facility on Monday to discuss dis-cuss the problems. According to administrator Dean Bithell, after the investigation, the health department de-partment determined that the facility facil-ity had in fact provided the appropriate approp-riate care to the patient in question. "The patient who had bed sores had come to us with the problem from an Ogden facility. Much of the patient's problem was caused . from an inappropriate wheelchair and that problem has been corrected," cor-rected," he said. O CONTINUED ON PAGE 2 Nursing homes defended CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1 O Mr. Bithell said Park View has "taken pride" in their ability to prevent and treat bed sores. "We feel this is a serious problem for our patients and we want to treat them immediately," he said. South Davis Community Hospital Hospit-al administrator Gordon W. Bennett Ben-nett said, "I wasn't too excited about ab-out the report, but I guess it's good general information." He added that the two "minor infractions" the facility was guilty of were corrected cor-rected the day of the inspection, but they were reported anyway. Speaking of the "imprbperadmi-nistration "imprbperadmi-nistration of drugs" charge, Mr. Bennett explained that the medications medica-tions for a patient who had moved two days earlier had not been thrown away. "Yes it was an infraction in-fraction and it should have been handled properly, but it doesn't mean a patient got the wrong medi cation and that's what people might think when they see the report," re-port," he said. "The reports are not too informative in terms of selecting a nursing home. People need to visit a facility before they decide," said Bennett. Life Care of Bountiful administrator adminis-trator Ed Chris agreed. "I found that report to be informative, but what worries me is that families may use the report as the sole determining de-termining factor on the quality of a nursing home," he said. This was the first report that the new facility had received and it showed deficiencies in three of the 32 standards. "Actually we are graded in over 500 areas and if we are deficient in only three of those, we're doing well for a new facility," facil-ity," he said. Mr. Chris was referring refer-ring to a statement made by Dennis McFall, executive vice president of Utah Health Care Association, "It is important to realize," emphasized Mr. McFall, "that the performance indicators utilized in the report itself represent less than 10 percent of all the requirements that a facility must meet. There are over 500 separate requirements in total with which a facility must concern itself. "In addition, the guide does not address the severity or duration of the problem leading to the cited deficiency. de-ficiency. A deficiency may represent repre-sent an ongoing problem or may represent only the one time failure of a single staff person." "Our goal is to be deficiency free," said Mr. Chris and added that the facility's priority is "to give our patients the best quality of life that can be given." Because of the very nature of the data on which the HCFA report is based, the administrator said it should not be used as the final word about any nursing home, but rather as only a part of the difficult process of nursing nurs-ing home selection. |