CARING PLACE HEALTHCARE GROUP STATEMENT REGARDING COVID-19

The safety and well-being of our residents, patients, employees and visitors is our priority. During this period of heightened awareness, we are taking additional precautions.
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Committed to Safety of our Residents, Team Members, and Families

Our highest priority is the safety and well-being of our residents, team members, and families. We recognize that while we’ve prohibited visitation over the last six months, our team members are the biggest variable in the lives of our residents. We have prioritized their safety so that we can keep our residents safe. We have done this by working diligently to provide all of the personal protective equipment they need to protect themselves from transmitting any symptoms to our residents.

When our team members enter the facility, they are first asked to sanitize their hands; then there is a station with surgical and/or N-95 masks for them to don. Once they have done that, they are then screened for any symptoms and their temperature is taken. If a team member has experienced any symptoms, or has a temperature greater than 100.4 degrees, they are not permitted to work in accordance with Center for Disease Control (CDC) and Ohio Department of Health (ODH) guidelines.

Since mid-April, we have had the ability to test team members and residents for COVID-19 using a nasal swab. Through our partnership with University of Cincinnati Medical Center, we are able to receive results in 24-48 hours. We use the information to determine if we need to quarantine or isolate our residents, and if we need to keep team members off of work following CDC guidelines.

Since July, our team members have been participating in bi-weekly testing. I’m proud to report that our positivity rate has been about 1%, and in almost all of the cases, the team member has been asymptomatic.

In July, we started visitation, and we’ve adopted a similar process for screening our families and we have spaced people out six feet apart and, in many cases, we’ve used a plexiglass screen to separate people.

We share this with you because we believe that our facilities are some of the safest places for our residents, team members, and families. We are proud of the job we have done managing our residents and team members throughout the first six months of COVID, and we expect to continue making every effort to maintain the highest level of infection control practices.

We invite you to complete the contact us form located on each facility web page if you’re interested in more information.

Thank you.

Chase M. Kohn
Chief Operating Officer

Medicare Rating

The Rating System from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid

The Five-Star Quality Rating System is a tool to help consumers select and compare skilled nursing care centers. Created by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) in 2008, the rating system uses information from Health Care Surveys (both standard and complaint), Quality Measures, and Staffing.

The Nursing Home Compare Website features a quality rating system that gives each nursing home a rating of between 1 and 5 stars. Nursing homes with 5 stars are considered to have much above average quality and nursing homes with 1 star are considered to have quality much below average. There is one Overall 5-star rating for each nursing home, and a separate rating for each of the following three sources of information:

Health Inspections – The health inspection rating contains information from the last 3 years of onsite inspections, including both standard surveys and any complaint surveys. This information is gathered by trained, objective inspectors who go onsite to the nursing home and follow a specific process to determine the extent to which a nursing home has met Medicaid and Medicare’s minimum quality requirements. The most recent survey findings are weighted more than the prior two years. More than 180,000 onsite reviews are used in the health inspection scoring nationally.
Staffing – The staffing rating has information about the number of hours of care provided on average to each resident each day by nursing staff. This rating considers differences in the levels of residents’ care need in each nursing home. For example, a nursing home with residents who had more severe needs would be expected to have more nursing staff than a nursing home where the resident needs were not as high.
Quality Measures (QMs) – The quality measure rating has information on 11 different physical and clinical measures for nursing home residents. The rating now includes information about nursing homes’ use of antipsychotic medications in both long-stay and short-stay residents. This information is collected by the nursing home for all residents. The QMs offer information about how well nursing homes are caring for their residents’ physical and clinical needs. More than 12 million assessments of the conditions of nursing home residents are used in the Five-Star rating system.

Caution: No rating system can address all of the important consideration that go into a decision about which nursing home may be best for a particular person. Examples include the extent to which specialty care is provided (such as specialized rehabilitation or dementia care) or how easy it will be for family members to visit the nursing home resident. As such visits can improve both the residents’ quality of life and quality of care, it may often be better to select a nursing home that is very close over one that may be, compared to a higher rated nursing home that would be far away. Consumers should therefore use the Website only together with other sources of information for the nursing homes (including a visit to the nursing home) and State or local organizations (such as local advocacy groups and the State Ombudsman program).

source: CMS.gov

March 12, 2018

What Does it Mean to be a 5 Star Rated Community?

The Rating System from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid The Five-Star Quality Rating System is a tool to help consumers select and compare skilled nursing care centers. Created by […]