Report: For-Profit Nursing
Homes Offer Worse Care
NEW YORK, Aug 31 (Reuters Health) - People with
a loved one
 in
a nursing home may want to find out if it is a for-profit or
non-profit facility. A new study has found that private nursing
homes are more likely to provide poor quality care than are
non-profit or public facilities. "For the 1.6
million Americans who reside in nursing homes, the quality of
care largely determines the quality of life," Dr. Charlene
Harrington from the University of California, San Francisco, and
colleagues point out. Harrington's team analyzed
data from state inspections of over 13,500 nursing facilities
conducted in 1998, excluding facilities with fewer than 16 beds.
The investigators grouped the deficiencies into three
categories: "quality of care," quality of life" and "other,"
which included problems with administrative procedures and
record keeping. Private or investor-owned
facilities, which account for two thirds of the nation's nursing
homes, averaged nearly six deficiencies per home, whereas
non-profit and public facilities averaged about four
deficiencies per home--about a 40% difference in the number of
deficiencies, the report indicates.
"Nursing homes care for many people who are too frail, too sick,
too poor, and too powerless to choose or even protest their
care," the authors write in the September issue of the American
Journal of Public Health: Journal of the American Public Health
Association. "We believe that it is unwise to entrust such
vulnerable patients to profit-seeking firms," the researchers
conclude. In an interview with Reuters Health,
Harrington said, "We expected to find differences between
for-profits and non-profit facilities, because we were concerned
that for-profit facilities may be cutting corners to make money
for investors." The major difference between the
for-profit and non-profit nursing homes, Harrington explained,
is that for-profit nursing facilities have fewer staff than
non-profit facilities. "Staffing (of licensed
nurses) was 31.7% lower in for-profit compared to non-profit
nursing facilities," Harrington noted. And licensed nurse
staffing was more than 20% lower in for-profit than public
homes. "The families of nursing home residents
should be aware of the ownership status of the facility in which
their relative lives," Harrington advised. "If
families can choose among different facilities, they should find
out which facilities have higher staffing and fewer
deficiencies," she said. "Non-profit facilities are most likely
to have higher staffing and fewer deficiencies."
Consumers can compare quality among all US nursing homes at
http://www.Medicare.gov/nhcompare/home.asp.
SOURCE: American Journal of Public Health 2001;91:1452-1455.
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