Nursing homes

January 1, 2019

‘Bleed Out’ details how daunting the pursuit of justice can be for harmed patients

When doctors, hospitals, insurers, and their captive lawmakers howl about how unfair malpractice lawsuits allegedly can be for modern medicine, patients who have suffered harms while seeking medical services should require loved ones, friends, and members of their community to view Bleed Out.

This new HBO documentary details the decade-long quest by comedian Steve Burrows and his family for justice for his mother, Judie. She was an energetic, retired teacher when she fell from her bike and needed emergency hip surgery. Before she had recovered, she fell again and needed a second operation. But this time, something went wrong: She lost more than half her blood, fell into a coma, and suffered irreversible brain damage that meant that she would spend the rest of her life in institutional care in rural Wisconsin.

December 21, 2018

As assisted living facilities increase dementia care, resident safety risks rise

by Patrick A. Malone

They look like nursing homes, but they’re not. And for the health and safety of our elderly loved ones, we must know the difference.

These so-called assisted living facilities, operating with much less regulation and oversight than nursing homes, are raising concerns about the safety and quality of their dealings with a growing number of elderly Americans. That’s because they’re full not only of older residents but also difficult — and costly to care for — seniors with dementia.

Jordan Rau, of the independent, nonpartisan Kaiser Health News Service, deserves credit for diving deep into rising complaints and documented harms to residents of facilities “originally designed for people who were largely independent but required help bathing, eating or other daily tasks.” These places, “unlike nursing homes … generally do not provide skilled medical care or therapy, and stays are not paid for by Medicare or Medicaid.”

December 12, 2018

Medicare is fining nursing homes when patients are readmitted too soon to hospitals

by Patrick A. Malone

Federal regulators have warned nursing homes nationwide to improve the quality and safety of their patient care or face consequences that operators may hasten to heed. That’s because new penalties and rewards will hit them in a place that counts — their pocketbooks.

Two-thirds of the nation’s nursing homes will see a year’s worth of their Medicare funding reduced, the nonprofit, nonpartisan Kaiser Health News Service (KHN) reported, “based on how often their residents ended up back in hospitals within 30 days of leaving.”

KHN said that:

September 25, 2018

Doctors too readily provide dubious treatments to vulnerable seniors

by Patrick A. Malone

Doctors subject older patients to risky, costly, invasive, and painful tests and treatments, perhaps with good intention but also because they fail to see that the seniors in their care are individuals with specific situations with real needs that must be considered.

If physicians too readily accept conventional wisdom in their field, for example, they may push patients 65 and older to take low-aspirin, with the popular but mistaken belief that this practice will help prevent heart attacks, strokes, and dementia. This doesn’t work, and, it increases the risk in seniors of “significant bleeding in the digestive tract, brain or other sites that required transfusions or admission to the hospital,” the New York Times reported.

The newspaper cited a trio of studies, published in the New England Journal of Medicine and based on “more than 19,000 people, including whites 70 and older, and blacks and Hispanics 65 and older. They took low-dose aspirin — 100 milligrams — or a placebo every day for a median of 4.7 years.”

September 9, 2018

Nursing homes and assisted living facilities assailed for risky and shabby care

by Patrick A. Malone

Nursing homes, by scrimping on their staffing to maximize their profits, put their residents at grave risk for infections that too often have grisly and deadly results. Low-rated facilities run by Uncle Sam to care for elderly veterans also may be concerning. And those oft-pricey assisted living facilities may have their own response to dealing with difficult to care for elders — putting them out on the street.

Kaiser Health News Service, the Chicago Tribune, USA Today, and the Boston Globe all deserve credit for their digging into problems at facilities caring for the old, focusing on issues that should be at the fore for regulators, policy-makers, and politicians as the nation grays.

August 31, 2018

Americans in their 60s and 70s struggle as caregivers for older relatives

by Patrick A. Malone

Life can be hard, lonely, and difficult for adults who must become caregivers for their parents. If that sounds like the challenging story for tens of millions of millennials and Gen-Xers, yes, it’s true. But Judith Graham, in a column for the Kaiser Health News Service, describes what may be an even tougher role for startling numbers of seniors who find themselves solo caregivers for still older moms and dads.

Graham reported that a new analysis from the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College has found that 1 in 10 Americans between the ages 60 and 69 take care of parents in their 80s, 90s, and even older. For those 70 and older, the numbers increase, so 12 percent of these seniors care for even more elderly relatives. The research is based on data from 80,000 interviews (some people were interviewed multiple times) conducted from 1995 to 2010 for the Health and Retirement Study.

The analysis found that roughly “17 percent of adult children care for their parents at some point in their lives, and the likelihood of doing so rises with age. That’s because parents who’ve reached their 80s, 90s or higher are more likely to have chronic illnesses and related disabilities and to require assistance.”

July 18, 2018

In health care, nursing homes not alone in confronting staffing problems

by Patrick A. Malone

It’s unlikely to surprise anyone who has visited friends or loved ones at a nursing home that such facilities too often are woefully staffed.

But why have federal regulators allowed themselves to be gulled about nursing home personnel levels, and how will not just these care-giving sites but also others, notably hospitals, deal with the growing need for and imbalances in health care staff, including a tilt toward “astonishingly high” numbers of costly administrative staff folks who don’t provide direct patient care?

Jordan Rau, a reporter for Kaiser Health News Service, deserves credit for digging into daily payroll records that Medicare only recently has gathered and published from 14,000 nursing homes nationwide. Rau found that:

June 26, 2018

Why are advance directives so key? Look at tough stats on ventilator survival

by Patrick A. Malone

Grown-ups with the least bit of gray on them may want to step up their thinking on how they want to receive medical care under tough circumstances, especially if they consider a new, clear-eyed and hard-nosed study that dispels any myths about possible life-sustaining “miracles” of artificial breathing machines.

A research team with experts from Boston, San Francisco, and Dallas studied 35,000 cases in which adults older than 65 had undergone intubation and use of mechanical ventilators at 262 hospitals nationwide between 2008 and 2015.

They found that a third of patients intubated died in the hospital.

June 19, 2018

Hospitals and nursing homes need to do more to stop ‘boomerang’ abuses

by Patrick A. Malone

Uncle Sam soon will step up what may be a positive trend: getting hospitals and nursing homes to halt the unacceptable boomeranging of elderly patients between them. But will Trump officials be as quick with health care providers as they have been with poor, sick, and old patients to employ not just carrots but also sticks to get better outcomes?

The nonprofit, nonpartisan Kaiser Health News Service deserves credit for looking ahead to this fall, when the administration aims to accelerate the end of perverse incentives that have hospitals and nursing homes shuttling the sick and elderly between them far too often. As Jordan Rau of the news service reported:

With hospitals pushing patients out the door earlier, nursing homes are deluged with increasingly frail patients. But many homes, with their sometimes-skeletal medical staffing, often fail to handle post-hospital complications — or create new problems by not heeding or receiving accurate hospital and physician instructions. Patients, caught in the middle, may suffer. One in 5 Medicare patients sent from the hospital to a nursing home boomerang back within 30 days, often for potentially preventable conditions such as dehydration, infections and medication errors, federal records show. Such re-hospitalizations occur 27 percent more frequently than for the Medicare population at large.

May 31, 2018

A bit of optimism for the 65+: a dozen years on average of cognitive health

by Patrick A. Malone

As many as five million Americans already have Alzheimer’s and other dementia-related conditions, and their resulting loss of cognitive capacity and personal control rank among the top causes for health dread among those 55 and older, polls show. So it’s worth noting that new studies are showing that seniors 65 and older get on average a dozen years of good cognitive health ── and that span is expanding.

Further, the onset of problems typically may occur in relatively mild fashion, with the most serious cognitive decline occurring in a short but late period of 18 months or so, Judith Graham reported for the independent, nonpartisan Kaiser Health News Service.

In her story for the KHNS feature “Navigating Aging,” Graham looks at an array of the latest and reliable research on seniors and cognitive decline, finding glimmers of optimism in what has been increasingly gloomy, evidence-based studies on how huge a challenge may be posed for our fast-graying nation by dementia, Alzheimer’s and their care.