Nursing homes under microscope

A nationwide nursing home quality-improvement project that will effectively open the often embattled industry to a lot more public scrutiny was rolled out Tuesday by the federal government.

The Nursing Home Quality Initiative kicked off in Utah with the release of a performance assessment that's been under way by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services for about 18 months. It marks the beginning of linking the public directly to government reviews of how individual health-care facilities are performing.

The study rated the nation's 17,000 care centers, including Utah's 91 nursing homes, in several areas such as pain management and bedsore prevention. The review is a baseline for the project, which is ultimately intended to provide consumers a more detailed and timely resource pool of nursing home services and quality information such as the frequency of bedsores and use of physical restraints.

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BORDER="1"> FACE="Verdana,Helvetica,Arial" SIZE="2">Additional information: FACE="Verdana,Helvetica,Arial" SIZE="2"> Web sites: Medicare's nursing home comparison Web site Choosing a quality nursing home Consumer guide to choosing a nursing home

Many of the nursing homes that do well in state Department of Health quality-control reviews also show high marks on the center's lists. A complete list is to appear in a full-page advertisement in both Salt Lake-based daily newspapers on Wednesday.

Nursing home quality measures are available on consumer-accessible Web sites for providers across the country as of Tuesday at www.medicare.gov, Nursing Home Compare section.

As reported in a special series of articles on nursing homes in the Deseret News in August specific treatment information has been lacking, and performance reviews that are available can lag several months behind, leaving many families without much to go on when choosing a care center, as well as frustrating some nursing home owners who are trying to make good-faith efforts to improve.