By Anne Montgomery
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has issued the long-awaited “conditions of participation” rules proposed for nursing homes. These rules signal another step in the ongoing shift in CMS toward encouraging more livable and well-supported facilities and staffing. However, since long-stay residents must consider the facility to be their home, we urge CMS to take additional steps to recognize that these individuals, who are often very frail and vulnerable and in many instances nearing the end of their lives, must be afforded rights of independence, autonomy and choice that would apply if they were instead living in their own private home. We offer more discussion of this with respect to certain aspects of the proposed regulation in the letter. A link to our comments is available below.
The link to a PDF file of our comments can be found here: https://improvingeldercare.files.wordpress.com/2019/09/076e3-cecai-nursing-home-comments.pdf