Monday, April 16, 2012
Associated Press
WASHINGTON
Tornado, hurricane or flood, nursing homes are woefully unprepared to protect frail residents in a natural disaster, government investigators say.
Emergency plans required by the government often lack specific steps such as coordinating with local authorities, notifying relatives or even pinning name tags and medication lists to residents in an evacuation, according to the findings.
That means the plans may not be worth the paper they’re written on.
Nearly seven years after Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans exposed the vulnerability of nursing homes, serious shortcomings persist.
“We identified many of the same gaps in nursing home preparedness and response,” investigators from the inspector general’s office of the Department of Health and Human Services wrote in the report being released today. “Emergency plans lacked relevant information. ... Nursing homes faced challenges with unreliable transportation contracts, lack of collaboration with local emergency management, and residents who developed health problems.”
The report recommends that Medicare and Medicaid add specific emergency planning and training steps to the existing federal requirement that nursing homes have a disaster plan. Many such steps are in nonbinding federal guidelines that investigators found were disregarded.
In a written response, Medicare chief Marilyn Tavenner agreed with the recommendation, but gave no timetable to carry it out.
Nationally, more than 3 million people spent at least some time in a nursing home during 2009, according to the latest available data. Nearly 40 percent of them, 1.2 million, were in the top 10 disaster-prone states.