Shawnee Christian Nursing Center (SCNC) is a lowly rated (1/5) nursing home compared to Monticello House nursing home (MH) (4/5), even though they are both located in Dallas city. The difference is derived from SCNC health inspection ratings, which stand at 1 out of 5 (MH ratings stand at 4/5).
Health inspections help to identify whether a health facility meets healthcare standards such as the provision of a suitable nursing home environment, proper interaction between the residents and staff, and the processes by which residents receive care. These are prerequisites for quality care, and the low SCNC rating shows that the nursing home does not deliver quality patient care.
The five SCNC fire safety deficiencies (MH has two) show that SCNC does not offer a suitable (safe and panic-free) nursing environment, thus contributing to low-quality health care. In addition, the Civil Money Penalty received (MH has none) shows that SCNC experiences financial mismanagement. More so, SCNC has more incidents and complaints (23 complaints and two incidents) than MH (0 incidents and one complaint).
Like most profit corporations (SCNC is non-profit ), MH is well-managed (focused on quality care), and that is why it has fewer incidents on factors such as fire safety standards and health inspection, the driving factors for quality health care. This explains why MH receives fewer complaints from patients (Medicare.gov 1-6).
Among the complaints made include lack of a program that can prevent the spread of infection, inappropriate and inaccurate record-keeping, and lack of specialized treatment for patients with care plans. There are several ways of mitigating complaints, and as a manager of SCNC, my first strategy would be communication enhancement.
I would make sure that SCNC provides patients with information about the available services and procedures to avoid misinformation. ‘Ask the Nurse’ system where a specified nurse handles patients’ complaints could be set for the information dissemination purpose. As a result, patients in need of specialized care would know what is available and what is not.
In addition, this would enhance the staff – patients’ interaction. I would also make sure that I provide guidelines on physician and hospital coding activities, productivity, audits, and education standards. This would limit and eventually eradicate any fraudulent acts.
In addition, I would coordinate, manage, implement, and develop procedures and policies aligned with the proper dissemination of information and accurate/appropriate record keeping. This would result in the more accurate and appropriate information (Allied Health Profession, 1-4).
I would also adopt a profit-making approach where my focus would be to provide quality information to enhance quality care and minimize complaints. SCNC operates in an area with more residents (167) than MH (67). However, the SCNC RN staff spends more time with each resident (1 hour 37 minutes) than MH (43 minutes). This simply implies that MH addresses more patients’ complaints by attending to more patients.
Therefore, I would seek to review the service delivery strategy in reference to how it supports staff operations and its alignment with quality care. For this reason, I would initiate workflow improvement by limiting the number of times RN staff spends with patients to make sure that more patients are cared for and more complaints addressed.
Most importantly, I would continuously assess, improve, and coordinate the above activities to make sure there is continual quality care (Allied Health Profession, 4-9).
Works Cited
Allied Health Profession. The Health Information Management (Him) Professional. The Health Professional Network, 2001.
Medicare.gov. Nursing Home Compare. The Official U.S. Government Site for Medicare, 2011.