GAO Eyes VA LTC Quality Efforts

The officials found problems with infection control at 59% of the nursing homes. At many of those nursing homes, “staff did not follow handwashing policies and procedures,” Randall Williamson, a GAO director, writes in a report summarizing the GAO’s findings.

The VA developed training guidelines and checklists for evaluating nursing home employees, and nursing homes were supposed to report on efforts to meet quality requirements.

But “VA headquarters cannot provide reasonable assurance of resolution of deficiencies because it does not clearly document the feedback that it provides” to the nursing homes, Williamson says.

The VA also does not have a systematic approach to verify the quality performance information the CLCs are sending it, Williamson says.

The GAO is advising the VA to require more reporting on how well the nursing homes are adhering to corrective action plans and to come up with a process for verying the information reported by the nursing homes.

The VA also should develop and implement a process to identify and deal with nursing home quality risks by doing a better of analyzing VA nursing home care quality and quality of life data, Williamson says.