As discussed at the Community Collaborative last week, Genesis will be revising the list of providers given to patients and families who will be selecting a skilled nursing facility for their post acute care.  One of the key quality points communicated to consumers will  be the presence of 24/7 RN staffing in area facilities.  As we discussed and agreed upon on Wednesday morning, the easiest and most accurate way for us to receive this information is on a daily basis direct from each facility.  To that end, we will begin with the following process:

A representative at each skilled nursing facility and a backup will be designated to forward labor information to Genesis each morning.

Each morning, Monday through Friday, this representative or their designee will take the posted staffing sheet from the previous day, scan it electronically and send it to:

Blogger comment:

Wow … now the hospitals are the judge of long term care quality namely nursing homes.  Since they have their own nursing homes it seems a conflict of interest and disingenuous by having their tail wagging the dog.  First of all it may not be feasible for any facility to guarantee they will have RN coverage 24/7 due to any number of reasons … mainly weather and no shows.  In more reality terms it goes beyond wanting to staff 24/7 RN’s … unavailability of recruits is the main one because the major competitors have them all … namely hospitals and Genesis in particular.  Secondly RN’s are not flocking to Skilled Nursing Facilities due to the work load and stress.

When I was running our owning nursing homes it was my goal to have RN’s around the clock but never was it 100% and in my opinion won’t be in the immediate future.  The LPN’s in many cases are more competent than the new RN or the older RN.  Beyond that it is pure speculation that RN’s provide more quality than LPN’s when it comes to Chronic Care, Alzheimer’s, dementia, restorative nursing, obesity, mental and behavioral problems.  I would personally prefer a blending of RN’s and LPN’s during the day and week-ends rather than dictate RN’s 24/7.  Also the reimbursement systems  namely Medicare and Medicaid don’t pay for that level of acuity and probably won’t.

So if the tail is going to wag the dog the tail needs to cough up the difference in pay levels because the government hasn’t and won’t.  Jerry Rhoads