New guidance asks for less institutional, more personal care
FRIDAY, June 19 (HealthDay News) -- A warm, welcoming environment where residents are free to make choices regarding their care: That's the new vision of the ideal nursing home, according to a guidance issued Friday by the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).
The directives in the CMS guidance aim to "transform nursing homes into environments that are more like [residents'] homes through both environmental changes and resident-centered caregiving," CMS Acting Administrator Charlene Frizzera said in an agency news release.
The guidance will serve as a kind of outline that CMS nursing home inspectors can use to make sure a particular facility is reaching federal regulations on good quality care, the agency said. The guidance went into effect June 12.
Included in the new proposals:
Almost 1.5 million Americans now live in an estimated 15,800 nursing homes spread throughout the country, CMS noted, and more than 3 million will spend at least some time in a nursing home this year.
"Many facilities cannot immediately make these types of changes, but it should be a goal for all facilities that have not yet made these types of changes to work toward them," the guidance reads.
More information
You can download the full guidance here.
-- E.J. Mundell
SOURCE: U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, news release, June 19, 2009
Copyright©2009 ScoutNews,LLC. All rights reserved |