How U.S. Nursing Home Ratings Deceive the Public

The pandemic has exposed the flaws in the government’s rating system.

State health inspections do little to penalize homes with poor infection prevention and control records. From 2017 to 2019, according to The Times, inspectors at least once cited nearly 60% – more than 2,000 – of five-star facilities nationwide for failing to follow basic safety precautions, such as regular hand washing. . Still, they got the top marks.

In San Bernardino, Calif., Inspectors wrote to Del Rosa Villa for four different infection control violations. He kept his five stars. Ninety residents of the 104-bed facility contracted the coronavirus and 13 have died.

Del Rosa Villa officials did not respond to requests for comment.

Life Care Centers of Kirkland, Washington, the first nursing home in the United States to have documented cases of coronavirus, was discovered in 2019 to have poor infection control, despite receiving five stars. State inspectors drafted it for failing to “consistently implement an effective infection control program.”

Thirty-nine of the facility’s residents have died from Covid-19. The house has 190 beds.

Leigh Atherton, a spokesperson for Life Care, said the quote was the only infection control breach that inspectors had identified in 32 previous visits. She said the house quickly fixed the problem.

Forty-one Death

Had the scoring system worked as expected, it would have provided clues as to which houses were most likely to experience uncontrollable outbreaks, and which houses were likely to do well.

This is not what happened.

The Times found that there was little to no correlation between star rating and how homes performed during the pandemic. In five-star establishments, the death rate from Covid-19 was only half a percentage point lower than in establishments that received lower ratings. And the death rate was slightly lower in two-star establishments than in four-star homes.

The location of a facility, the infection rate of the surrounding community, and the race of a nursing home’s residents were all indicators of whether a nursing home would suffer from an outbreak. The number of stars didn’t matter.