UW CHWS Affiliate Investigator Rachel Prusynski, who has co-authored two recent papers on the quality effects of nursing home sales, weighed in on new research highlighting major shifts in nursing home ratings. A recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Directors Association (JAMDA) revealed significant fluctuations in nursing home ratings over an 11-year period, with nearly 28% of facilities with a 5-star rating dropping to 1 star over an 11-year period, while more than 40% of those initially rated at 1 star improving to 5 stars.
Prusynski shared her thoughts with McKnight’s Long-Term Care News: “Changes in ownership are associated with worse quality measures, whether you’re looking at star ratings, individual quality measures, or staffing, but a huge caveat to all of that research is that the effects are very small. I don’t think you can attribute a large portion of the declines in overall star ratings to changes in ownership. There is so much more behind a change in overall star rating that you can’t attribute these changes to any one operational change or sale.”
Read more here and check out the cited study below:
Impacts of Skilled Nursing Facility Change of Ownership on Staffing: A Staggered Difference-in-Difference Analysis