Fogarty Lauds Nursing Home Survey Satisfaction Survey

Rhode Island Government, Dec 07, 2006

Lt. Governor Charlie Fogarty hailed the release of the first ever quality report on resident and family satisfaction in Rhode Island nursing homes. The report is one in a continued series of public reports on health care facility quality required under a law sponsored by Lt. Gov. Fogarty in 1998.

Fogarty said, “I have am happy to see that we now have a comprehensive system in place to monitor and report the quality of our state’s 92 nursing homes. This report measures elements of resident and family satisfaction, which are important dimensions of quality care for patients. Combined with existing public reports on nursing home clinical care and nursing home inspection reports, families and patients will now have access to critical information that can help them decide what nursing home to choose. As important, nursing homes now have crucial information to continue building on the progress we have made in improving quality long term care to our seniors.”

The Lt. Governor has made quality health care a priority of his administration. In 1998 he sponsored the nationally recognized "Fogarty Law" that requires health care quality reports for hospitals, nursing homes and other health care facilities. The Lt. Governor was instrumental in the development and passage of the "Germaine Morsilli" Act, which is intended to implement many of the 42 recommendations for improving nursing home quality and state oversight made in a report issued in November 2004 by the Nursing Facility Closure Task Force of the Long Term Care Coordinating Council which Fogarty has chaired since 1996. Fogarty convened the Task Force following the closure of Hillside Health Center after it was found to be providing substandard quality of care and its owners/operators failed to bring it into compliance and filed for bankruptcy. Hillside’s closure uprooted dozens of residents forcing them to find new nursing homes and brought untold heartache to family members. Hillside’s closure exposed serious care issues as dramatically noted in a series of Providence Journal articles which highlighted the harm suffered by one Hillside resident, Germaine Morsilli.