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...

There is a trend I’m noticing in surveys recently when the surveyors are conducting staff interviews.  It seems some survey teams are having facility staff members write and sign statements outlining what they’ve done wrong as discovered in the surveyor’s interview of them.  The statements are then used as evidence to support the tag you are about to be cited for a deficient practice.  Why are administrators allowing...

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...