The long-term care associations held a quarterly meeting with KDADS survey leadership for updates on adult care home survey trends. Below is a summary of the issues discussed.
Assisted Living Attached to Nursing Home
Nursing home surveyors will no longer be surveying assisted living facilities when they are attached to a nursing home. Attached assisted living facilities will be surveyed by the same teams the currently inspect free-standing assisted living. Observations on attached assisted living surveys:
- Surveyors finding that many facilities are not doing required quarterly education on disaster and emergency preparedness
- Surveyors doing a lot of “FYI”s to help facilities get into compliance for issues that may have been treated differently by nursing home surveyors
- No G+ deficiencies have been identified
- Seeing strange versions of the functional capacity screen. NOTE: There is a functional capacity screening manual available from the state
- If attached assisted living providers are nervous about the new surveyors, they can obtain the surveyor forms from KDADS and familiarize themselves with what surveyors will be looking at.
Nursing Home Survey Frequency
In the current state fiscal year, the average amount of time between health care surveys is 17.6 months. The longest wait as of March was 26 months.
LPNs Joining Survey Teams
KDADS is pursuing several solutions to help bring down the number of months between health care surveys. One of these solutions is opening up survey teams to include LPNs. The concept is to use LPNs as “health survey assistants” who will come in and look at the less clinical areas, such as physical environment and social services. The LPNs could complete those assessments, and move on while the RNs concentrate on clinical issues. KDADS hopes that this model will cut down the amount of time surveyors have to spend in buildings. KDADS is waiting on the Governor’s approval of the plan.
Survey Data for Calendar Year 2017
NOTE: These summaries do not include complaint survey data. Complaint surveys have now become the most frequent type of nursing home survey, and are the main source of high level deficiencies. We are working with KDADS to revamp the information given to the associations to make it more useful and meaningful for our membership.
