The Role of Organizational and Structural Factors

Using Long-Term Care Ombudsman Program complaint data (N = 3,360) from all of Connecticut’s 261 nursing facilities, this study investigated facility characteristics that may be correlated with resident complaints. Complaints per 100 beds and four subcategories of complaints established by the Administration on Aging (AoA) were the dependent variables. The presence of volunteers trained by the Ombudsman Pro-gram significantly predicted total complaints. At the bivariate level, profit status, size, location, citations, and the presence of a volunteer resident advocate were associated with the rate of complaints. However, multivariate analysis exposed a more complex pattern of relationships. The strongest model explained slightly more than 9 % of the variance using the nine predictors. This indicates that other factors such as psycho-social characteristics of complainants may influence complaint reporting, rather than structural/organizational components of the facility. Keywords: ombudsman program; nursing home complaints; ombudsman program volunteers As Kosberg and Tobin (1972) noted more than 30 years ago, nursing homes share more differences than similarities. Although every nurs-ing home could be broadly described as a licensed care facility, a fa