Neighbors to Save Rivington House

02/04/2022

Reimagining Long-Term Care
Tremendous compilation of thinking, strategy, research.
-The Inevitability of Reimagining Long-Term Care"
-The Uncertain Future of Nursing Home Post-Acute Care
-Building Trust in Post-Acute and Long-Term Care: Strategies for Sustainable Change
-Dutch Long-Term Care in Transition: A Guide for Other Countries
and more..

If you don't remember your password, you can reset it by entering your email address and clicking the Reset Password button. You will then receive an email that contains a secure link for resetting your password

02/04/2022

Delivering on Mayor-Elect Eric Adams’ ambitious agenda will require a best-in-class senior staff. Fontas Advisors will be actively monitoring the Mayor-Elect's daily announcements, aggregating the names of the senior administration appointments including deputy mayors, agency commissioners, and Ci...

02/04/2022

"Decades of market-driven hospital and health system consolidation have left too many communities across the United States without timely access to needed care as the nation continues to struggle with the COVID-19 pandemic. The people most affected by hospital downsizing and closings have been Black, Latinx, Indigenous and other people of color, as well as those who are uninsured, immigrants, women, LGBTQ+ people, people with disabilities and vulnerable older adults."

Community Catalyst’s first priority is quality affordable health care for all. We provide leadership and support to state and local consumer organizations, policymakers, and foundations working to change the health care system so it serves everyone.

02/04/2022

New York Nursing Homes Suing the State Received Federal Provider Relief Funds

"Last week, the Center for Medicare Advocacy (Center) issued a Report about New York State nursing facilities and their trade associations that sued their State to prevent implementation of a new State law requiring them to spend 70% of their revenues on care (including 40% on “resident-facing staff”) and limiting their profits to 5%. Effective January 2022, the new law requires facilities to remit to the State any “excess revenue” not meeting these accountability measures. The facilities argue in their lawsuit that if these two provisions in the 2021-22 State budget law had been implemented in 2019, they would have been required to remit $824 million to the State.[1]

The Center reported that the plaintiff nursing facilities include one of three Special Focus Facilities (SFF)[2] in New York State, five of New York’s 15 candidates for the SFF Program, and seven of 11 facilities sued by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York in June 2021 for allegedly fraudulently billing Medicare for unnecessary services, in violation of the federal False Claims Act. This Alert discusses the $19,529,428 in Provider Relief Funds received by the 13 plaintiff facilities."

Where did 13 nursing homes spend 20 million dollars in "relief" funds?

01/21/2022

Key Takeaways – Millions Diverted from Care

The facilities’ reported excess income could have paid the annual salary and benefits of nearly 5,600 additional full-time Registered Nurses.[ii] RNs are generally the only staff in the facility with the training to provide clinical oversight. Higher RN staffing levels are associated with positive resident outcomes including reduced pressure ulcers, infections, pain, and mortality.[iii]
The facilities’ reported excess income was the equivalent of over 26 million additional nurse aide hours (hourly wage, excluding benefits).[iv] Nurse aides provide 90% of the care and services residents receive. Low nurse aide staffing is associated with higher rates of pressure ulcers, falls, and degrading conditions for residents.
The average excess annual income claimed by the providers was $2,144,770.[v] [Note: This figure excludes profits extracted via related party transactions.[vi]] That is equivalent to almost 112,000 nurse aide hours per facility.[vii]
Key Takeaways – Poor Care + Demeaning Conditions = Big Profits

LTCCC ALERT: NY NURSING HOMES ADMIT EXCESS PROFITS Industry Lawsuit Details Over $500 Million Per Year Diverted from Resident Care January 21, 2022 – At the end of December, more than 200 nursing homes filed a federal lawsuit against New York State, seeking to stop implementation of a new state la...

01/21/2022

"Conditions at the Rawlin at Riverbend, a 72-bed home in Springfield, were horrific because of critically low staffing and a lack of training. Elderly residents screamed from their rooms for assistance, and workers had to make the kinds of decisions that people are forced to make in war: Do you take precious time to do emergency wound care, even though you aren’t quite sure how, knowing that it means other residents might sit in their own f***s for hours or trip and fall in the hallways? Do you stop to feed a resident who has trouble swallowing, knowing that others may not be fed if you do?

According to workers, Onelife, the company that operated the Rawlin, did not provide enough staff to properly care for the dozens of residents with dementia and other serious health problems. Around 20 residents died in about two months, from mid-November 2020 to mid-January 2021, only six of them from Covid. Many of the other deaths, caregivers believe, could have been prevented with better treatment.

Families of the residents, who often serve as a second pair of eyes on an industry prone to neglect, were mostly unable to enter the Rawlin for months because of Covid, so the added pressure to staff the home properly disappeared. After the facility lost its on-site registered nurse, Onelife temporarily replaced her with a regional nurse who visited the premises a few days a week and otherwise had to be reached by phone."

After a spate of deaths, a group of health care workers in Oregon decided that to save lives, they needed a union.

01/12/2022

The state of Connecticut has issued a new order putting COVID patients in nursing homes as hospitals see overcrowding thanks to the latest COVID variant.

The state will issue the order despite Democrat governors in multiple states like New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey forcing nursing homes early in the COVID pandemic to take COVID patients — decisions that resulted in as many as 50,000 elderly people dying as COVID spread in their facilities.

The spread of COVID in nursing homes in New York was so bad after Andrew Cuomo issued his order that 15,000 or more nursing home residents died, a number that he covered up and that some officials believe is higher.

Connecticut will ask nursing homes take COVID patients regardless of their status, meaning COVID-positive patients will be sent to the facilities with at-risk residents.

The state of Connecticut has issued a new order putting COVID patients in nursing homes as hospitals see overcrowding thanks to the latest COVID variant. The state will issue the order despite Democrat governors in multiple states like New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey forcing nursing homes earl...

01/12/2022

Good for the Dept of Health, Gov Hochul and for Gottfried
"...nursing home hired two companies in which its investors or their families have an ownership interest in to supply the facility with temporary nurses and perform accounting services. The two companies netted profits totaling more than $1 million in 2019 from Safire Northtowns and from other nursing homes, according to documents filed with the New York State Health Department.

Just which of Safire Northtowns' investors – there are five – have ties to these companies is not clear in public documents.

But that may soon change.

New York State’s Health Department says it will soon issue guidelines to implement a new law that requires nursing homes for the first time to clearly publicly disclose whether their facilities do business with a related company.

The practice of nursing homes doing business with outside companies that have connections to the facilities’ owners is legal and widespread."

New York State’s Health Department says it will soon issue guidelines to implement a new law that requires nursing homes for the first time to clearly publicly disclose if their

12/29/2021

https://donaldgmcneiljr1954.medium.com/here-in-new-york-the-omicron-variant-is-getting-weird-db6d39058b18

The infected have the “wrong” symptoms. Many are sick and yet test negative. Whether it’s mild is still unproven. Sequences posted by NYU…

12/29/2021

On Feb. 6, the state’s Public Health and Health Planning Council approved Mount Sinai Beth Israel’s plan to construct a 70-bed hospital and new emergency department in the East Village, replacing its existing 700-bed facility two blocks away. The changes were in response to shifting healthcare trends, the hospital said, including an increase in outpatient services that’s resulted in fewer hospital stays. “There are too many inpatient beds, particularly in Manhattan,” a public presentation about the plan explained, noting that Mount Sinai Beth Israel has sustained $100 million in operating losses each year for the last six years.

The same week the hospital’s downsizing was approved, Gov. Andrew Cuomo was setting up a state-run hotline to answer the public’s questions about the Novel Coronavirus; it would be another few weeks before New York saw its first confirmed case of COVID-19. In the time since, as the number of sick and dying skyrocketed, the city and state have scrambled to increase hospital capacity: Officials have made use of a Navy hospital ship, set up field hospitals at the Javits Center and in city parks, and evacuated college dorms for potential medical use. Some patients have been transferred out of city hospitals to others as far away as Albany.

New York has closed dozens of hospitals in the last few decades, the result of larger healthcare trends, policy shifts and cost-cutting efforts. But that downsizing has been "called into question" by the coronavirus pandemic, experts say.

12/29/2021

“Currently, the state process of reviewing and approving and disapproving major health facility transactions is not transparent, or consumer-friendly,” said Uttley. There are no public hearings; CON decisions are ultimately made by the health commissioner and state’s Public Health and Health Planning Council (PHHPC), which critics say is disproportionately made up of health care executives rather than patient advocates. The Health Equity Assessment legislation represents “a major step forward” in terms of “getting the voices of affected communities into the conversation,” Uttley added.

Gov. Kathy Hochul recently signed the Health Equity Assessment Act, which advocates say will help address the impact of decades of hospital closures and consolidations across the state, which left certain communities—primarily low-income and neighborhoods of color—underserved when it comes to he...

12/29/2021

That shrinking network forces other nearby hospitals to pick up the strain—often safety net providers or public hospitals, where patients are more likely to be uninsured or on Medicaid—and leaves some neighborhoods with fewer healthcare resources than others.

Queens, for instance, has only 1.5 hospital beds for every 1,000 residents, compared to 6.4 beds per 1,000 people in Manhattan, according to one analysis. Those differences became even more visible—and consequential—during the COVID-19 pandemic, in which Queens was particularly hard hit. During the early peaks of the crisis, officials scrambled to increase hospital capacity, setting up beds at the Javits Center and clearing CUNY dorms for use as potential medical facilities.

“The COVID-19 impact made it really clear that hospital beds and other healthcare resources are not distributed equitably around the state,” said Lois Uttley, coordinator at Community Voices for Health System Accountability (CVHSA), a coalition of public health advocates.

New legislation, signed by Gov. Kathy Hochul last week, aims to address that by changing the Certificate of Need (CON) process, the state’s main mechanism for overseeing healthcare facilities. The Health Equity Assessment Act (S.1451A / A.191A) will require any hospital or clinic applying for a CON—through which the state grants approval for major changes like a closure, merger, downsizing or new construction—to assess the impact that change will have on the communities a facility serves.

Gov. Kathy Hochul recently signed the Health Equity Assessment Act, which advocates say will help address the impact of decades of hospital closures and consolidations across the state, which left certain communities—primarily low-income and neighborhoods of color—underserved when it comes to he...