Don’t you just love a deficiency-free survey?  I had the survey team exit today and they didn’t cite anything.  What a great feeling!  That doesn’t mean that deficiencies do not exist.  It simply means that we managed the survey in such a way that anything that did come up, we had an answer for, had QA’d, or had addressed in some other fashion.  I’ve had my share of cleaning up bad surveys for others,...

Here’s a quick and easy reference to find your facility’s historical survey results and see exactly what was cited.   This is especially important as you get close to your nursing home survey window.  If you were cited before, take my word, they’ll look again to see if you’re maintaining compliance. Click here to find the Nursing Home Survey 2567 for your facility.  (Pdf courtesy of cms.gov.) Share...

Several times in my career I’ve had to take a facility that was in it’s survey window and I just knew we were nowhere near ready.  It’s pretty stressful to realize the impending doom that survey can present if they find everything you know is wrong.  And there just isn’t enough time to get everything fixed. There are a few things you can do to improve your odds of having a decent survey at least clinically.  Some...

One of the easiest ways to get tags cited in your facility is to invite the State to pay you a visit.  Self-reports of unusual incidents can and will get you deficiencies.  Let’s say you discover something in your facility that went wrong and had a negative outcome.  Most of the time, it is almost like a race to make sure the facility gets the report in to the State timely.  You get the initial report in and...

Every nursing home is required to have at least an annual survey in the range of every 9 – 12 months.  Of course, if you have complaints or are a focus facility, your survey will have a shortened span between them, every 6 months or so. The goal of every nursing home administrator and facility should be to be survey ready everyday.  It does no good to not think about survey all year until the State survey team shows up. So, to...

One thing I try to do is to learn from my mistakes.  So, I’ll share some of my mistakes in this section called Lessons Learned so hopefully you can learn from them, too.  The lesson we’ll talk about today is about family members coming to take your resident out of the facility. This incident happened to me several years ago when I was first starting out. I was a new nursing home administrator working in one of my first...