SUBMITTED ARTICLE
KING CITY — The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has released preliminary results from its new five-star rating system for Nursing Home Facilities, and has given Mee Memorial Hospital’s Skilled Nursing Unit unit a five-star rating.
CMS created the Five-Star Quality Rating System to help consumers, their families and caregivers compare nursing homes more easily and to help identify areas about which you may want to ask questions.
“We at Mee Memorial’s SNF Unit are proud of the service that we offer the community. Our team on the second floor work hard to provide the best quality care to our patients. Our nurses and staff care for our residents as if they were their own family,” said Van Carter, director at Mee Memorial Hospital’s Skilled Nursing Unit.
The Nursing Home Compare website features a quality rating system that gives each nursing home a rating of between 1 and 5 stars. Nursing homes with 5 stars are considered to have much above average quality and nursing homes with 1 star are considered to have quality much below average.
There is one Overall 5-star rating for each nursing home, and a separate rating for each of the following three sources of information:
• Health Inspections — The health inspection rating contains information from the past three years of onsite inspections, including both standard surveys and any complaint surveys. This information is gathered by trained, objective inspectors who go onsite to the nursing home and follow a specific process to determine the extent to which a nursing home has met Medicaid and Medicare’s minimum quality requirements. The most recent survey findings are weighted more than the prior two years. More than 180,000 onsite reviews are used in the health inspection scoring nationally.
• Staffing — The staffing rating has information about the number of hours of care provided on average to each resident each day by nursing staff. This rating considers differences in the levels of residents’ care need in each nursing home. For example, a nursing home with residents who had more severe needs would be expected to have more nursing staff than a nursing home where the resident needs were not as high.
• Quality Measures (QMs) — The quality measure rating has information on 11 different physical and clinical measures for nursing home residents. The rating now includes information about nursing homes’ use of antipsychotic medications in both long-stay and short-stay residents. This information is collected by the nursing home for all residents. The QMs offer information about how well nursing homes are caring for their residents’ physical and clinical needs.
More than 12 million assessments of the conditions of nursing home residents are used in the five-star rating system.
