From Tennessee comes a cautionary tale for nursing home operators about the perils of contracting with parties who provide services reimbursed by the federal government. Outsourcing and downsizing are sometimes good ways of dealing with not having enough professionals on staff to provide services, but contracts with these providers should be ...

One of the reasons that new parents buy electrical outlet covers is because they know that children are apt to put their fingers in places they should not. The same can be said for demented patients, and recently a New York facility was cited by the state for failure to secure its electrical lockboxes. The facility in Albany County, New ...

I know that sometimes I must sound like a broken record, but an incident in a Vermont nursing facility underscores why it is so important for nursing personnel to actively manage patient interactions. In Bennington, Vermont an 84-year-old woman suffering from dementia walked into the room of a 58-year-old man. The man was heard yelling, and ...

Last week a client called me up and asked me this question: could he legitimately refuse to hire health care workers because they smoke?  His position was that as a health care organization, it was important to hire individuals who share the commitment of the organization to healthy lifestyles. He also objected to the fact that ...

The number of felons reported in long-term care facilities in Chicago has increased by three percent from November to December, following reports of violent attacks by residents. Since 2006, state law in Illinois has required that long-term care facilities do background checks on all new residents and immediately notify state health officials ...

For the most part, nursing home administrations would like to be able to make the determination about how many staff are needed for a given situation on their own without government oversight. This has always been the American way. The employer gets the freedom to decide about staffing, taking all the risk and getting all the reward for ...

Yesterday, after two days without power, I returned home to find my home in darkness, with the temperature hovering at 43 degrees. A massive ice storm broke trees like dried spaghetti, and cut power to over 44,000 homes in the Jefferson City, Mo. area. (See attachment at the bottom of this post for a photo of iced trees) When I went to the ...