The Use of a Tool to Assess Long Term Care Surveyor Efficiency and Effectiveness

The quality of care in our nation’s long term care facilities or nursing homes has been a steadfast matter of public policy for the past few decades. In response to research and reports of poor care, the Nursing Home Reform Act (NHRA) was born in 1987. Since that time, additional legislation has been passed to address the same issue. Continued research in early 2000 has shown that although there have been strides toward increasing the quality of care in these facilities, serious care issues continue to exist. As part of NHRA, every long term care facility in this country that accepts payment from the federal government must complete a survey every nine to fifteen months. There are two types of long term care surveys: the traditional and quality indicator survey (QIS). Recent research has documented that both survey processes are flawed. To date, the federal government has no way to monitor whether QIS is meeting its objectives. The purpose of this quality improvement project is to evaluate the use of a tool to assess surveyor efficiency and effectiveness on each survey task in the long term care survey. A tool was developed to evaluate surveyor efficiency and effectiveness and a pre-pilot was completed in early March of 2014, to test the tool. The outcome of that testing was that data collection was complex; many of the survey tasks were conducted simultaneously making it impossible for one researcher to conduct the evaluation. At the same time, the participating healthcare organization decided that another project took precedence. Although the project never was completed, the evaluation of surveyor efficiency and effectiveness is recommended in further research, as thousands of residents in long term care facilities depend on the survey process to ensure high quality of care