Guidelines for Nursing Home Care

24 Jun Guidelines for Nursing Home Care

Medicare is implementing a new format to combat nursing home abuse, developing new and creative ways to improve nursing home management. The Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) issued new guidance for nursing home surveyors on June 19, 2009. This new guidance further defines and describes several important dimensions of care to help improve nursing home residents? quality of life and environment.
Starting June 22, 2009, nursing home surveys will focus more on resident’s rights in areas including:
?Ensuring they live with dignity;
?Offering choices in care and services;
?Accommodating the environment to each of their needs and preferences; and
?Creating a more homelike environment – including access for visitors.

These new surveys are intended on raising the level of care at nursing homes and ensuring the residents receive the best care. “The improvements in the guidance are intended to support efforts underway to transform nursing homes into environments that are more like their homes through both environmental changes and resident-centered caregiving” said CMS Acting Administrator Charlene Frizzera.

A home environment is accomplished through a more personal caring process, developing relationships with both staff and other members, and a comforting and welcoming environment. These surveys attempt to help the CMS discover the ways in implementing an approach to accomplish these traits.

This new guidance seems to indicate a larger cultural change in nursing homes, some of which are already on that path. Hopefully these surveys will allow patients to feel completely comfortable and raise the quality of care at nursing homes across the country.