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

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) issued new guidance for nursing home surveyors, offering more clarification for several components of the survey that aim to improve nursing home residents’ quality of life and environment. Under these new guidelines, nursing home surveys will be focused on key areas such as ensuring residents live with dignity, offering choices in care and services, accommodating the environment to each residents’ needs and preferences, and creating a more homelike environment with access to visitors.

CMS Acting Administrator Charlene Frizzera calls the revisions groundbreaking. “The improvements in the guidance are intended to support efforts underway to transform nursing homes into environments that are more like their homes through both environmental changes and resident-centered caregiving,” she was quoted saying in EmaxHealth.

The guidelines put much emphasis in making the nursing home environment much more homelike by no longer serving meals on institutional trays and eliminating noise from paging systems, alarms and large nursing stations. More focus will be put in individualizing care and building relationships with the residents. Residents will now have the right to make choices concerning their schedules such as daily walking, eating, bathing and bedtime.

The new guidance aims to be a roadmap for environmental and cultural change, and facilities are encouraged to be proactive in adopting the new guidelines. However, the guidance states: “many facilities cannot immediately make these types of changes, but it should be a goal for all facilities that have not yet made these types of changes to work toward them.”

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