US News & World Report’s well-known nursing home ratings kicked up the heat on operators this year, adding information on ownership tenure, weekend staffing levels and infections.
The 13th edition, out today, also evaluates more than 15,000 nursing homes on care, safety and health inspections. It uses publicly available information and a ratings methodology that differs from the Five-Star Quality System featured on the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ Nursing Home Compare website, organizers point out.
More than 1,600 short-term rehab nursing homes earned US News’ ‘high-performing’ rating, while more than 1,100 long-term care facilities boasted the designation.
While attempting to build its own assessing identity, US News this year also followed federal regulators’ recent lead in focusing more on ownership information and staffing characteristics.
The magazine debuted continuous ownership as a structural measure. It shows whether a facility maintained or changed ownership within the most recent 12-month period for which data was available, and is derived from data in the CMS Provider Info file from July 2021.
The most important and influential components in the US News ratings are processes of care, structure of care, staffing, types of facilities, and outcomes, lead researcher Zach Adams told McKnight’s Long-Term Care News on Monday.
More on — what else? — staffing
The organization decided to add weekend staffing and infection prevention as standards because both are indicators of quality care, he said. Using CMS Payroll-Based Journal information, his group separated Monday-through-Friday shifts from weekend shifts in an effort to highlight any inconsistencies.
“It’s got to have a consistent workforce providing care every day of the week, not just the standard work week,” he said.
A long-term care nurse leader, however, poked back at Adams’ implication that lower weekend levels equated to malfeasance by definition.
Weekend staffing in SNFs is typically lower because there aren’t as many administrative nurses working the weekend, pointed out Amy Stewart MSN, RN, vice president of education and certification strategy for the American Association of Post-Acute Care Nursing on Monday.
“People such as the DON, or DNA, or ADON typically work Monday to Friday and fill in as needed on weekends,” Stewart said. “The weekends typically have less physicians doing rounds and fewer orders to process.”
Adams added that for the US News short-term rehab ratings, infection data is crucial.
“Evaluating how many infections were converted into hospital stays, that’s a pretty serious decline, and often indicative of a lapse in care,” he said.
