Lag in investigations resulted in confirmed deficiencies plummeting from 1,648 in 2019 to 393 in 2020
With doors to nursing homes closed for months during much of the pandemic’s first year, advocates feared many of the problems within their walls would be hidden from the outside world.
So there’s no way to gauge how many were missed when the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services issued an order on March 20, 2020, suspending some nursing home inspections, including investigations into complaints as well as surveys for relicensing and recertification. Tony Chicotel, a senior staff attorney with the California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform, has tracked California nursing home complaints for nearly a decade. CANHR is a statewide nonprofit that strives to improve quality of life for long-term care residents.
“I’ve seen some studies that show that facilities with infection control deficiencies prior to the pandemic had worse outbreaks,” Chicotel said. “In retrospect, it was damn near impossible to prevent COVID from getting into the building, but where I think the real differences in quality showed up was in the size of the outbreak.
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