“CMS created the Five-Star Quality Rating System to help consumers, their families, and caregivers compare nursing homes more easily and to help identify areas about which you may want to ask questions.”
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has enhanced its Nursing Home Compare public reporting site to include a set of quality ratings for each nursing home that participates in Medicare or Medicaid. The ratings take the form of several “star” ratings for each nursing home. CMS supports nursing homes embracing the concept of culture change and offering resident-centered care. However, currently the definition for culture change and resident-centered care is not well established, so facilities are left to self-proclaim this characteristic. CMS …”would consider adding culture change and resident centered care to Nursing Home Compare when the terms are defined objectively.” CMS encourages consumers to visit facilities and ask staff if the organization operates in a culture change environment and how the facility is implementing resident-centered care.
The health care business is becoming more aware of the link between consumers’ ideas about quality and their choice of caregivers. Providing quality care is not only the right thing to do, but the financially sound thing to do as well.
For now, five star ratings can be tricky for some homes to obtain due to the way the measures are calculated by CMS. But often nursing homes are well known in their community for providing good quality care and excellent customer service. Customer service is an area that everyone in health care needs to put more work into. Let’s just say that sometimes we forget that the task we are focused on is for the purpose of resident satisfaction. We sometimes tell the resident — the customer that we serve —that he or she needs to work around our schedule.
Resident-centered care or customer-centered care — both are individualized service. Join us this October for a look at how we can improve our quality of care by changing the way we think about our care.
