Long Term Care Compliance- Are you prepared for the ramped-up inspections?
Post-acute care facilities have long been the subject of reforms targeting quality of care and staffing issues. The COVID-19 pandemic, the biggest public health crisis most of us have witnessed, shook the nation to its core and had a tragic impact on our nursing homes. It’s no surprise that governing agencies took notice and called for change. Thus, to align with the latest federal guidance on long term care home surveys, consider what policies and practices your facility needs to update to better ensure regulatory compliance.
New requirements from the Ministry of Long-Term Care and a new time-limited enforcement effort by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), call for focused inspections and put a higher level of scrutiny on long term care home compliance and the quality of care provided. It is important to acknowledge that preparing for these surveys and inspection audits can be stressful for long term care home administrators and staff. To position your long term care home for optimal outcomes, it is important to examine the ministry documents, the OSHA inspection initiative, and highlight any new changes put forward as well as what steps your facility can take to better prepare for these surveys.
Recently, an OSHA memo, announced a focused, short-term initiative involving inspections of long-term care facilities and hospitals that have prior citations or complaints. OSHA is “focusing on follow-up and monitoring inspections of hospitals and long-term care facilities that OSHA had previously inspected or investigated,” the memo said. The agency intends to magnify its presence in those facilities with the goal of protecting the health and safety of healthcare workers. Other calls for reform have come from inside the healthcare industry such as enhanced clinical oversight and infection control requirements, more robust staff development, accountability for poor-performing facilities, and changing accommodations to single-resident rooms to assist in infection control efforts. While it may seem like the guidelines are returning to pre-pandemic levels, long term care homes will come under greater scrutiny in 2023 and the years to follow. Therefore, understanding how these initiatives impact your facility is a crucial step as you update your compliance plans at the facility level. An important step is to review your education management policies and systems to ensure they are adequate for your compliance needs. A compliance and education management system that saves time and keeps you on track for future surveys can help ease the burden that educators and HR personnel face in this year of changing compliance regulations.
A robust compliance management program can increase staff preparedness, which increases safety of the care environment, which increases care quality and outcomes and improves overall readiness. Increasing care quality involves a partnership with your staff as you hire, educate, mentor, and evaluate. If instead you are spending time manually keeping track of evolving regulations, monitoring licensure and education requirements, and updating compliance training, you have less time to focus on your quality goals which is keeping infections to a minimum and making sure the home is safe for all.
Again, at IPAC Consulting Inc, let us help you consider what strategies and policies you can put in place or enhance to better manage your alignment with these new expectations. Make sure you have systems that support your ability to adapt along with the compliance regulations and successfully emerge from regulatory scrutiny!
