Beasley, Allen, Crow, Methvin, Portis & Miles, P.C.

Choosing a skilled nursing facility for a family member can be a daunting task. A web site, MemberoftheFamily.net, aims to help by offering free, easy-to-understand reports based on government surveys of approximately 16,000 nursing homes across the country. The site allows readers to review past and present state survey results, fire safety violations and substantiated complaints for all Medicare/Medicaid-certified nursing homes anywhere in the United States.

Perhaps the most useful tool on the site is the National Watch List, which provides a listing of nursing homes cited for violations or that have received substantiated complaints. This list is broken down state by state and then alphabetically by the facility name, with color-coded warning labels and scope/severity codes.

MemberoftheFamily.net also provides an honor roll of facilities found to be deficiency-free.

The organization was founded in the mid-1990s by Dr. Edward C. “Terry” Watters, a Maryland physician fed up with the low standards and lack of sufficient care some of his patients were receiving in nursing homes. Watters and partner Dennis Steele petitioned for government reports about nursing homes and learned how to translate the federal Online Survey Certification and Reporting (OSCAR).

According to the site, “As they assembled the facts and ran statistical analyses, a bleak picture emerged of understaffing, physical abuse, untreated bedsores, and coldhearted decision-making by home operators and state officials charged with monitoring facilities.”

Since 1999, information on MemberoftheFamily.net has been available to the public at no cost. The organization is affiliated with no other group and all efforts have been self-funded.

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