US studies show for-profit nursing homes inferior

The Canadian study on long term care facilities discussed yesterday noted that US studies have indicated that for-profit long term care homes were inferior to for-profit homes.

In a 5-year examination of complaints in all US states, Stevenson¹² found that for-profit facilities had an almost two-fold greater chance of receiving a complaint compared with non-profit facilities and that chains had a significantly higher rate of complaints compared with non-chain facilities. Harrington and colleagues⁵ also found that for-profit investor ownership predicted 0.679 additional “deficiencies” (a US regulatory measure similar to unmet standards), and chain ownership an additional 0.633 deficiencies per facility compared with non-profit facilities.

On another issue, the Canadian study notes "that non-profit, single-site facilities demonstrate higher complaint rates in comparison with public and charitable facilities. This diversity of performance between public and non-profit groups has been described previously in Canadian research on ownership and quality in nursing home populations. One study found that BC hospitalization rates for care-sensitive conditions in publicly owned or hospital-based facilities were significantly lower than in both for-profit and non-profit single-site facilities.²² A more recent study from British Columbia suggested that these differences may be related to the higher staffing levels in publicly owned facilities as compared with both for-profit and non-profit single-site facilities.^23"

^{The full study can be found by clicking here.}

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