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...

It never fails, someone needs to pick up their paycheck before the scheduled paycheck disbursement time.  We’ll say 2:oo pm on Friday.  You know that there is a reason you were told not to let the paychecks go early.  You know that if you let one employee do it, then every other employee will also have an emergency where they need to get theirs as well.  But this one employee is a really hard-worker.  And, she’s going out...

Decisions, decisions!  Nursing home administrators are faced with the task of making decisions multiple times each day.  Many times there really isn’t a clear right answer for the decision to be made.  So, how does one know what to do?  Over my years as an administrator, I have developed a simple test to help me make the right decision.  I test the potential outcomes of my decision against the priorities I have set for my...

Here is a picture of a nursing home administrator’s best friend.  No, not my dog!  It’s the watermelon book sitting behind him. (Although, my Boston Terrier, Maverick,  ranks right up there, too!) The Long Term Care Survey book, F-tag book, or any other name you might call it is commonly referred to as the “Watermelon Book” in our circles.  It’s called the watermelon book because of the color...

Believe it or not, 90%+ of the staff members working in a nursing home have no idea of how the facility is assigned deficiencies (usually called tags or F-tags) or what the letter grade it receives actually means.  I am going to give you a quick and easy look at how deficiencies are cited per the scope & severity grid I included below. SCOPE As you can see, we have a box with several columns and rows of letters.  The columns...