Health and Human Services
Good afternoon. I’m sorry to differ from Kayshawn about the monthly report from the ACC as today I’m going to talk about how much it could be improved. Once again, the report only lists the three Nursing Home Compare sub ratings and omits the overall rating, which is still one star. That is the only rating that most prospective residents see when they use the Medicare site to search for a nursing home and it is certainly the most important, but it is never in the report. There’s nothing about the recent Survey results. Notably, in July, the facility appears to have made a profit of over three hundred thousand dollars. The ACC report is still following the same format that it has for many years. Whoever writes it always triumphantly lists the recent hires and omits any mention of how many people left employment there during the same time period. The ACC is never included in the chart called “Staffing Data” about the vacancies in each department at the end of the entire report, although it is in fact a county department like the others.
I would love to see a report from the ACC that at least attempts to match the professionalism of the other departments, with relevant data regarding the health status of the residents such as mortality rates, therapy utilization and avoidable incidents, rather than the bare numbers of therapy treatments or meals prepared. The report we get clearly shows how little the writer is willing to reveal and how that department alone is held to unbelievably low standards of accountability to the taxpayers by those who are in charge of it.
That means you legislators, of course. Some of you made campaign promises about taking back the ACC. 20 months in, the Sunset Lake LDC is gone, yay, and we have a new county-employed Administrator, yay, who is a very smart, educated and capable person. However, the advise he gets is from our consultant and county personnel who are still working with the consultant to transform a publicly owned facility into a private one, most recently by downgrading our nursing positions, because they’ve never been told to stop. Is this really the best you can do? Mr. Liddle spoke recently about his conviction that we need to coexist with Infinitecare, but what I see is that the consultant is still running the facility, not the county. Let’s take it back.