If you are looking for a nursing home placement for a family member — or yourself — you might be interested to know about the latest resource offered by the federal government. A list of 56 nursing facilities meriting “special focus” because of problematic levels of care — and lack of improvement — has now been released by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

We have written before about the difficulties family members face when choosing a nursing home for a parent, spouse or other loved one. Once the selection is made family members need to remember that individual facilities change over time — with staff departures, changes in staffing levels, funding limitations from corporate offices and the constant revisions of reimbursement rules and rates, even a good facility can slip quickly.

For most of the nursing homes on CMS’ “special focus facilities” list, however, rapid decline in quality of care has not been the issue. Twenty-one of the nursing homes on the list have been there for three years.

One might reasonably suspect that problem nursing homes would be clustered around large urban centers, but the list suggests that poor performance may be more of a rural phenomenon. Long-term problem facilities are in Colorado (Grand Junction), Iowa (Burlington), Idaho (Gooding), Minnesota (McIntosh), New Mexico (Bayard), Oklahoma (Pawhuska) and Washington (Longview), just to name a few. Meanwhile, California, New York, Texas and Illinois have only one “special focus facility” each (in Yuba City, Syracuse, Taylor and Forest Park, respectively). Arizona, incidentally, managed not to place a single nursing home on the list. Washington State, Missouri and Florida each had three.

The list does not actually include all of the CMS “special focus facilities.” There are over 120 homes meriting that designation, which results in six-month reassessments rather than the annual reviews usually given to nursing homes. The recently-released list contains the worst of the worst — those homes that not only scored badly, but also failed to improve on recent re-inspections. It is also worth noting that there are about 16,400 nursing homes nationwide, so even the larger list of poorly-performing facilities represents just less than 1% of all nursing homes.

How can you find out if the nursing home you are considering — or the one where you have placed a family member — is a “good” home? CMS can help you uncover positive information, as well. The “Nursing Home compare” pages on Medicare’s web site provide a wealth of information about every nursing home in the country, as well as plenty of background information about quality measurements of the nursing home industry.

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