State Names Other Nursing Homes on Federal List

By Cindy Hadish, The Gazette, Cedar Rapids, Iowa

Dec. 8–Names of three other Iowa nursing homes on a “poor performers” list were revealed Friday after the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said states have authority to release the names.

Abington on Grand in Ames; Cedar Falls Health Care Center and Polk City Nursing and Rehabilitation joined previously named Blair House in Burlington on the list of “special focus facilities.”

Medicare last week released a list of 54 of the nation’s nursing homes whose inspection results were among the poorest in each state. Blair House was the only Iowa facility on the list.

Naming only Blair House, which made significant improvements after undergoing a management change this summer, prompted a response from Dean Lerner, director of the Iowa Department of Inspections and Appeals.

Lerner last week told The Gazette that Blair House wasn’t the “worst of the worst,” as the list would suggest, but at the time said he could not reveal other names.

His department conducts nursing home inspections under contract with Medicare, which in the past has prohibited release of information unless authorized.

Medicare spokeswoman Julie Brookhart said facilities that didn’t make the list released by Medicare were either new to the focus facilities list or close to being off the list, so Medicare did not want the names revealed by the media.

“For newly designated nursing homes, CMS wishes to make sure the nursing home has an opportunity to inform staff and residents about what it means to be an SFF and what the nursing home residents can expect, before reading about their facility’s SFF status in the newspaper (or) seeing it on TV. In addition, we wish to give the nursing home an opportunity to demonstrate significant improvement before being publicly named,” she wrote last week in an e-mail to The Gazette.

David Werning, spokesman for the Department of Inspections and Appeals, said Medicare officials on Friday clarified their position to say states could release the names. “That was completely contrary to what we’ve heard before,” he said.

Inspection reports cited Cedar Falls Health Care Center, the only other Eastern Iowa nursing home named besides Blair House, with several deficiencies. Those included failing to ensure that a resident had a medical condition warranting use of physical restraints; failing to provide physician visits every 60 days for some of the residents and failing to provide adequate dining supervision of a resident on a pureed diet and at risk of choking.

One report details a 2006 incident in which a resident “known to take food off others’ plates” appeared to choke and died.

The health care center’s administrator, Nathan Greiner, said physician reports showed the resident did not choke.

Greiner said he didn’t know why Cedar Falls Health Care Center was chosen, but the center sees the selection as an opportunity to improve.

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