Sunday, October 02, 2011

Obama Looking at Nursing Home Quality

"An estimated 40 percent of nursing facility residents are admitted to the hospital in a typical year, and one-quarter of these may be preventable, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. A congressional review panel estimates that about 14 percent of patients discharged directly from hospitals to skilled nursing facilities are sent back to the hospital for conditions that could have been avoided.

Many hospital emergency rooms are filled with frail seniors on Friday afternoons. Why? Because nursing homes know they won’t have enough weekend staff to care for their sickest residents, so they simply send them back to the hospital. The new rules could stop those practices."
Obama Cracks Down on Nursing Home Quality - Forbes

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