Do Chicago Nursing Home Residents Receive Better Quality of Care at Nonprofit Facilities?
According to a statistical review of 82 individual studies, nonprofit nursing homes, on the average, provide a higher level of care than for-profit homes. The study was published online last month in the British Medical Journal.
Data from the different studies was collected from tens of thousands of nursing homes—primarily in the US—between 1965 and 2003. 40 of the 82 studies favored nonprofit assisted living facilities in terms of statistically significant comparisons. Three of the studies favored non-profit nursing homes for all significant comparisons.
Per the authors’ meta analysis, nonprofit nursing residences provided better quality of care than their for-profit counterparts in the areas of staffing, bedsore care, and physical restraint use (less frequent in nonprofit homes). This is disturbing when you consider that not giving a nursing home patient the care he or she can receive, and needs, can lead to injuries and illnesses as a result of nursing home negligence.
The study implies that 7,000 of the 80,000 nursing home residents suffering from bedsores live in for-profit nursing homes. The findings also indicate that nursing home residents would receive an additional 500,000 hours of care/day if for-profit nursing homes were replaced with nonprofit assisted living facilities. The death rate in for-profit versus nonprofit dialysis facilities is also higher. Nonprofit assisted living facilities also were cited for fewer deficiencies during governmental assessments.
According to the study’s senior author, Dr. Godon Guyatt, nonprofit homes are less concerned about spending their money in ways that satisfy shareholders.
Of the 1.5 million people living in almost 16,000 US nursing homes, about 2/3rds of nursing home residents live in for-profit assisted living facilities. Over 3 million people will spend at least a portion of time in a US nursing home in 2009.
The thought that any nursing home would provide a patient with anything but the quality of care needed is disturbing. The idea that for-profit nursing homes might be giving residents a less superior quality of nursing care than their nonprofit counterparts is upsetting when you consider how many people may opt to place their sick or elderly loved ones in these for-profit facilities because they believe that the care provided might be better.
Nursing home abuse or negligence can be grounds for a Chicago nursing home abuse lawsuit if a patient gets hurt or dies.
Nonprofit Nursing Homes Provide Better Care, Major Study Finds, Science Daily, August 20, 2009
Nursing Homes, Medicare.gov
Related Web Resources:
British Medical Journal
