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Nursing home industry disputes results of Gannett violations study.


More than 500 nursing homes nationwide have repeatedly been cited within the past five years for life-endangering violations, according to according to
prep.
1. As stated or indicated by; on the authority of: according to historians.

2. In keeping with: according to instructions.

3.
 a recent study by Gannett News Service.

In the study, which reviewed inspection results at 16,000 nursing homes from full calendar years 1998 to 2002, facilities received numerous violations for such transgressions as failing to protect patients from mistreatment mis·treat  
tr.v. mis·treat·ed, mis·treat·ing, mis·treats
To treat roughly or wrongly. See Synonyms at abuse.



mis·treat
, hiring staff without criminal background checks and allowing patients to be neglected or physically abused.

Fines for violations range from $50 to $10,000 a day. Fines in 2002 were more than $12.4 million for 2,200 cases.

Although many healthcare industry members agree that there's room for improvement in nursing homes, many of them also say that the Gannet gannet: see booby.
gannet

Any of three oceanic bird species (family Sulidae) closely related to the booby. Gannets are found in the North Atlantic, where they are the largest seabirds, and in temperate waters around Africa, Australia, and New
 News Service results were just one perspective of a very complex industry and might have made nursing homes look worse than they are.

"We don't support keeping nursing homes open if they're not providing good care," said Susan Weiss, vice president of American Homes and Services for the Aging in Washington D.C. "But a lot of these reports were based on egregious circumstances. Surveyors were coming in looking for Looking for

In the context of general equities, this describing a buy interest in which a dealer is asked to offer stock, often involving a capital commitment. Antithesis of in touch with.
 problems."

Gannett also based its findings on inconsistent survey data, according to Susan Feeney, spokesperson for the American Health Care Association The American Health Care Association (AHCA) is non-profit federation of affiliated state health organizations, together representing more than 10,000 non-profit and for-profit assisted living, nursing facility, developmentally-disabled, and subacute care providers that care for  in Washington D.C. "These surveys are skewed skewed

curve of a usually unimodal distribution with one tail drawn out more than the other and the median will lie above or below the mean.

skewed Epidemiology adjective Referring to an asymmetrical distribution of a population or of data
 to some degree," Feeney said. "The surveys are not done by the same person. Each surveyor adds [his or her] own personal inflections to the report."

The nursing home surveys also don't paint a complete picture of nursing homes, Feeney said.

"One facility might report a higher rate of pain, for instance, because they could be accepting a higher number of acuity patients," Feeney said.

Even still, Pat McGinnis, executive director of California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform in San Francisco San Francisco (săn frănsĭs`kō), city (1990 pop. 723,959), coextensive with San Francisco co., W Calif., on the tip of a peninsula between the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay, which are connected by the strait known as the Golden , said the issue of nursing home violations is a serious problem.

California has more deficiencies than almost any other state, McGinnis said. She cited a recent study done by Harry Waxman, a congressman from Beverly Hills, Calif., in which 382 of 419 nursing homes in southern California each had several violations.
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Title Annotation:evaluation of nursing home care quality; Gannett News Service; Front Page
Author:Lieberman, Lisa
Publication:Contemporary Long Term Care
Geographic Code:1USA
Date:Jul 1, 2003
Words:352
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