CDC established National Influenza Vaccination Week (NIVW) in 2005 to highlight the importance of continuing flu vaccination through the holiday season and beyond.
Source: CDC
In a release sent by Wisconsin’s Department of Workforce Development, by the end of January, 71 full-time employees at Bridges of Milwaukee Rehab and Care Center, located at 6800 North 76th Street, will be out of a job.
A spokesperson for DWD told the I-TEAM a group called Employ Milwaukee will be handling services for the affected workers.
The I-TEAM discovered the nursing home, which houses about 75 residents according to recent inspection reports, was already on the state’s radar.
The nursing home is a “special focus facility.” That means the nursing home has had a history of quality care issues.
Every 15 minutes, someone in the United States dies of a superbug that has learned to outsmart even our most sophisticated antibiotics, according to a new report from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That's about 35,000 deaths each year from drug-resistant infections, according to the landmark report.
Rita Bedford, 94, was kept confined to her apartment in a Chilliwack, B.C., senior care home for two weeks last December over the holidays — while bedbugs multiplied on her mattress.
She is blind, and a staffer alleged in emails to provincial authorities that employees of The Cascades facility were ordered not to tell Bedford what was happening.
But, so disturbed by what she saw, the staffer took photos.
Senior living organizations with communities in certain parts of California put their disaster preparedness plans into action over the weekend as wildfires spread.
Sunday, Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a statewide emergency “due to the effects of unprecedented high-wind events which have resulted in fires and evacuations across the state,” some of them mandatory.
“The Kincade Fire in Sonoma County has burned more than 30,000 acres to date and has led to the evacuation of almost 200,000 people and threatened hundreds of structures,” the governor’s office posted online. “As of today, there are over 3,000 local, state and federal personnel, including first responders, assisting with the Kincade Fire alone.”
Three women who ran a “fighting ring” at a North Carolina assisted living facility encouraged residents to get into a physical altercation, officials say.
They were workers at the Danby House in Winston-Salem in June when they didn’t intervene in a fight between two residents with dementia, according to a report from the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services.
The House just passed a groundbreaking bill that would restore legal rights to millions of American workers and consumers.
Lawmakers voted 225-186 Friday to pass the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal (FAIR) Act, a far-reaching bill that bans companies from requiring workers and consumers to resolve legal disputes in private arbitration — a quasi-legal forum with no judge, no jury, and practically no government oversight.
Maria Davila lay mute in a nursing home bed, an anguished expression fixed to her face, as her husband stroked her withered hand. Ms. Davila, 65, suffers from a long list of ailments — respiratory failure, kidney disease, high blood pressure, an irregular heartbeat — and is kept alive by a gently beeping ventilator and a feeding tube.
Doctors recently added another diagnosis to her medical chart: Candida auris, a highly contagious, drug-resistant fungus that has infected nearly 800 people since it arrived in the United States four years ago, with half of patients dying within 90 days.
Source: New York Times
According to recent data by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there are over 65,000 paid and regulated long-term care (LTC) facilities in U.S. serving about 9 million patients.
The LTC sector includes everything from nursing homes, adult day care service centers and home health agencies to hospice homes, assisted living communities and other residential care centers. The LTC market is experiencing significant shifts because attitudes towards long-term care are changing. Owners and operators are in the midst of developing creative solutions for the evolving industry by diversifying services and increasing specialized care.
Tropical Storm Dorian is expected to strengthen into a Category 2 hurricane as it heads toward the southeastern US over the Labor Day weekend.
A deadly strain of salmonella that has sickened more than 250 people may not respond to the antibiotics commonly prescribed to treat the foodborne infection, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
A judge this week dissolved a partnership behind a network of nursing homes and assisted living facilities in several states, criticizing the majority owner’s lack of cooperation and the “complicated jumble of entities” through which he operated.
ELCM was a private-equity acquisition firm specializing in real estate and healthcare investment that had a presence in at least 10 states. But after having multiple facilities placed in receivership because of a failure to deposit rents, pay staff or provide critical resident services, several investors sued to have their partnership dissolved.
Source: McKnight's
Leaders at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) continued their public push to improve nursing home safety and enforcement this week, laying out plans to mine data to root out bad actors — while also emphasizing that the initiative goes all the way to the top of the federal government
An outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease at the Sheraton Atlanta during the busy summer travel season is a reminder dangerous germs can lurk in hotel hot tubs, showers and air-conditioning units.
Health officials in Georgia said this week there are now 11 lab-confirmed cases and 55 probable cases of the rare, but serious, lung infection linked to the outbreak. No one has died.
Pendulum, LLC is proud to announce the addition of Ms. Terry Shull to the company in the role of Vice President Claim Services.
Terry brings more than 30 years of liability claims experience to the Albuquerque-based risk management consulting firm, with most of that experience in long term care and health care professional liability. As part of the Pendulum Executive Team, Terry oversees all of Pendulum’s claims management programs and third-party administration operations. Pendulum’s claims management program offers boutique claims management, focusing solely on the aging services/post-acute continuum.
Source: PRWeb
NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — Once a week for two years, police Lt. Jeannine Pettiford had visited the nearby nursing home where her 52-year-old cousin with cerebral palsy lived. But on their daily phone call in early May, her cousin had bad news.
"I'm getting kicked out," he told her.
In disbelief, Pettiford asked to speak with a nurse, who told her there were rumors of closure. Her alarm rose when she visited the facility and saw nurses crying. The nursing home's owner, Skyline Healthcare, had told its staff there was no more money.
The Centers for Medicare & Medication Services dropped a pair of bombshell announcements concerning nursing homes late Tuesday afternoon, including a proposal to delay implementation of phase three of the Requirements of Participation one year until November 28, 2020.
The agency also issued a final rule allowing pre-dispute arbitration agreements, but it will prohibit nursing homes from requiring residents to sign them as a condition for receiving care. It also will require providers to inform residents or their representatives that they do not have to sign a binding arbitration agreement.
The federal website for information about nursing homes, Nursing Home Compare, reports information for each Medicare-certified and Medicaid-certified nursing facility in three categories – health inspections, staffing, and quality measures – as well as an overall score that combines the three domains.
Failure to pay 106 employees and furnish payroll records to Massachusetts have led the state’s attorney general to cite the owner-operators of the defunct Skyline Healthcare with $85,000 in citations.
MONTGOMERY, Ala. (WSFA) - The family of an 83-year-old woman has filed a lawsuit saying she suffered a heat stroke from being left in a assisted living facility’s van for six hours.
Source: WSFA News
The FDA alerted healthcare providers June 13 that at least one patient has died after receiving a fecal transplant containing drug-resistant bacteria.
Source: Becker's Hospital Review
As of now, a cure for Alzheimer’s Disease does not exist, but researchers at UNM believe they have found a way to prevent it. “I really wanted to take this as a challenge to see if we could develop any sort of treatment,” says Kiran Bhaskar.
Source: KRQE News
A bipartisan pair of U.S. senators on Monday released a previously undisclosed list of more than 400 nursing homes under consideration for placement on the federal government’s roster of properties with serious quality issues.
Source: Skilled Nursing News
Lawyers for an incapacitated woman who had a baby inside a Phoenix long-term care facility have filed a $45 million notice of claim against Arizona. The 55-page claim lays the groundwork for a lawsuit. The woman’s family cites medical records in arguments that she was “violently and repeatedly raped” and may have been pregnant before.
Source: McKnight's
Chicago reported its first measles case — and the second confirmed in Cook County — May 19, reports the Chicago Tribune. The confirmed cases come less than two weeks after a study identified the county as most vulnerable for experiencing a measles outbreak.
As the senior population in the U.S. increases, so does the need for more and more senior living communities. And with more senior living communities come more claims and lawsuits raised against them, so when they lose – it’s down to insurers to pay for the damages.
One of these cases involves a 103-year-old resident of a Sunrise Senior Living facility in Willowbrook, Illinois – Ruth Smith, who gets by with the help of a walker. One year ago, she went on a field trip to see a movie when she fell down concrete steps in the theater, leading to her death six weeks later. Her estate filed a lawsuit against the Sunrise Senior Living facility, claiming that aides didn’t provide adequate attention.
A Connecticut nursing home is being sued over the strangling death of a 76-year-old patient who police say was killed by her 81-year-old boyfriend in November.
The Connecticut Law Tribune reports the lawsuit filed Monday by the estate of Patricia Ann Way says Autumn Lake Healthcare at Bucks Hill in Waterbury should have known about her boyfriend’s violent history and failed to protect her. The estate’s lawyer says the lawsuit seeks “at least seven figures” in damages.
Industry trade groups slammed changes to Nursing Home Compare that went into effect on Wednesday, concerned that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is “moving the goalposts” for providers.
CMS’s switches to the ratings system caused about one-third of skilled nursing facilities’ ratings to drop drastically overnight without any corresponding dip in quality or staffing levels, the American Health Care Association estimated.
When Larry Anders moved into the Bay at Burlington nursing home in late 2017, he wasn’t supposed to be there long. At 77, the stoic Wisconsin machinist had just endured the death of his wife of 51 years and a grim new diagnosis: throat cancer, stage 4.
His son and daughter expected him to stay two weeks, tops, before going home to begin chemotherapy. From the start, they were alarmed by the lack of care at the center, where, they said, staff seemed indifferent, if not incompetent — failing to check on him promptly, handing pills to a man who couldn’t swallow.
Assisted living communities in Minnesota would be licensed via a new multi-tiered system under a proposal that state Health Commissioner Jan Malcolm shared during a state senate hearing last week.
If passed, Minnesota reportedly would become the last state to license assisted living settings. Current state law classifies assisted living communities, where more than 60,000 state residents live, as “housing with services” and requires registration instead of licensure.
Source: McKnight's Senior Living
It's the stuff of nightmares: Your loved one, who you thought was being well cared for in a long-term care facility or nursing home, was physically abused, raped or even impregnated. And you had no idea it was happening.
A company that provides contracted physicians to hospitals and nursing homes will pay a $500,000 penalty related to a breach and not having a business associate agreement (BAA) in place, Healthcare Info Security reported.
In late 2011, Advanced Care Hospitalists (ACH) engaged an individual who “provided medical billing services using (Doctor's First Choice Billings Inc.)’s name and website, but allegedly without any knowledge or permission of First Choice's owner,” according to the article. In 2014, a Florida hospital notified ACH that confidential patient information, including names, birth dates, and Social Security numbers, was viewable on the First Choice website.
An investigation revealed that, in violation of HIPAA laws, ACH never entered into a BAA with the individual who provided the billing services. ACH filed a breach notification report with the Office for Civil Rights; after a supplemental report was made, it was determined that more than 9,200 patients could have been impacted by the breach, the article states.
For more information on HIPAA breaches, visit your online resource center. And please share this news with your Administrator and Billing Office Manager.
Source: Healthcare Info Security
According to a disaster-planning expert, senior housing administrators and supervisors should focus on planning, training, and exercising when implementing a disaster plan at their facilities, McKnight’s reported.
“We would never expect an R.N. to walk into a job and nurse without any practice, but we do expect administrators and shift supervisors to be disaster managers with no training and one two-hour drill a year,” Keith F. Hansen, assistant director of the Center for Preparedness Education (CPE), told McKnight’s.
Hansen said that facilities should first ensure their plan addresses Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (SMC) and Joint Commission regulations. Staff should then be trained on the plan, and disaster drills should be conducted multiple times. Revisions should be made as necessary; if revisions are made, the aforementioned steps should be repeated, according to the article.
Hansen also said that while a plan to address a disaster is vital, just as important is a plan for post-disaster recovery—a process that can take up to three years. The key areas of focus for this plan are business continuity and behavioral health, the article stated.
“There's lots of psychological trauma that occurs in a disaster, especially if (a) facility has people with mental health or behavioral health issues. Disrupting that schedule can be very hard on people, so mental health is very important,” Hansen told McKnight’s.
