If you are a nursing home operator, I suspect you’d cringe when you hear about Medicare’s list of Special Focus Facilities. Special Focus Facilities (SFF) are nursing homes identified by Medicare that have a pattern of problems related to poor patient care.
Earning a spot on the SFF list really should be a major wake up call for the facilities to quickly improve patient care or risk losing funding from Medicare and Medicaid— the primary source of all nursing home funding. Put another way: improve your care or go out of business.
Oak Manor Healthcare & Rehabilitation Center, a Florida Nursing Home, is the latest facility to be named to this dismal list. The SFF designation for Oak Manor comes after officials inspected the facility and discovered dangerous conditions such as: unsupervised smoking and broken call bells for patients to alert staff of problems.
Oak Manor joins five other Florida nursing homes on the Special Focus Facility List. Hopefully the designation of Oak Manor as one of the poorer performers will be an impetuous for change at the facility from management as well as from patient families.
Related:
Special Focus Facilities: The Worst Nursing Homes Of All
Smoking-Related Fires Are A Real Threat To Nursing Home Patients. Is It Time To Put Out The Fire?
Call Lights. How Should Staff Respond?
Largo nursing home placed on list of nation’s worst, By Richard Martin, St. Petersburg Times