This is a sad story indeed as nursing home safety is important and gets overlooked all the time when it comes to safety. There have been issues too with the VA with disability cased that were tossed
as I read a couple weeks ago. We certainly don’t want this to take over with closing out investigations when people can’t get them done properly.
CMS is also said to be conducting their own investigation of nursing homes. One third of the nursing homes in California are in Los Angeles county. Complaints that were anonymously filed were on the top of the list to be closed so something to keep in mind when filing a complaint is that those go to the bottom of the stack it sounds like. Make sure any complaint has a name so folks are accountable to someone.
Some of the open cases go back to 2001 and there are said to be over 9000 open. BD
Facing a backlog of hundreds of health and safety complaints about nursing homes, Los Angeles County public health officials told inspectors to close cases without fully investigating them, according to internal documents and interviews.
The effort — known as the “Complaint Workload Clean Up Project” — has been going on since at least the summer of 2012, according to internal memoranda sent to managers and inspectors by county Department of Public Health supervisors.
State and federal officials, who contract with Los Angeles County to inspect nursing homes on their behalf, said they are now investigating the matter.
Statewide, public health officials have said there are more than 9,000 open cases dating as far back as 2001 and that they are addressing the backlog. A substantial portion of those cases are in L.A. County, but it is unclear precisely how many.
http://www.scpr.org/news/2014/03/04/42579/la-county-closed-nursing-home-safety-cases-without/
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