5 Essential Nursing Home Quality Measures

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If you own, manage, or even just work in, a nursing home, then there are measures you need to take to prevent injury to your residents. Not just injury, either. You are responsible for ensuring that none of your residents are at risk from neglect, malnutrition, and other problematic areas.

When quality assurance measures are not applied to nursing homes you shortly find patients become more at risk of medical problems. One such problem is that of bed sores. Without being regularly moved, at-risk patients find they may need medical procedures to treat a perfectly preventable condition. The last thing you, as a business owner, manager, or worker, want, is to be sued by a patient. According to Jonathan Rosenfeld, a lawyer specialising in nursing home claims, these cases can rack up to large amount that can have a serious financial impact. 

In order to prevent this, here are five quality assurance measures you ought to be considering as a responsible party.

5 Must-Have Checks

In order to be fully compliant with resident health and safety laws, you should be checking the following quality measures.

1 – Resident and patient safety 

First and foremost, all necessary accommodations are to be made to ensure patient health and safety. Prevention of bedsores is much less costly than the treatment of them – both in terms of human and cash costs. 

Monitor the number of patients and residents that are suffering from potentially serious medical conditions to keep tabs on how well you are doing with patient safety. A high occurrence of contamination, infections in the urinary tract, or even the failure of a food hygiene certification in your kitchen – all are signs of flawed patient safety systems.

2 – Monitor efficacy of care

How do you monitor how effective patient care has been? You can keep tabs on which areas patient decline is worst in. As most residents will be elderly, we can expect things like physical activity to decline over time. However, if you are failing your patients, things like weight, nutrition, and fitness level will all decline simultaneously. 

3 – Keep a Focus on Patients

It’s easy to make sure your nursing home business is keeping the primary focus on patients. All you need to do is to ask the visitors. Those who come to see parents and loved ones inside your building should be commenting that your patient is clean, well-tended to, and is looking healthy. If they are making the opposite comments, then something is wildly wrong.

4 – Response Time maintenance

Keep checking how long your staff take to come when a resident calls. It might be that it is an emergency, and someone has fallen out of bed. How long does the patient have to lie there before help arrives? If it is any longer than 30 seconds, then you may have a deficit somewhere. Try hiring more staff and increasing the number of carers on shift.

5 – Measures that Describe

These are things that help you get an overview of the quality of facility and improve as a whole. Measures in the descriptive category examine and challenge how many residents you have versus how many beds you have. It looks at finding the optimum level of nursing carers to residents. It monitors qualifications and background checks of staff.

The thing is, you need to employ all of these – and more – to get it just right. If your nursing home is falling short in any of these measures, then there are issues that you need to address. Otherwise you may well be failing in your duty of care.