Health & Human Services
I was surprised when I saw the article in the Democrat on Tuesday about the 3 hundred million dollars in state grants distributed to health care facilities, excluding Sullivan County from any of those funds. I’ve seen the list of awardees, which include hospitals, nursing homes, clinics and even Planned Parenthood, and wondered if any entity in Sullivan County had applied. For a county which is so challenged by the lack of healthcare resources, and whose hospital is on the state’s endangered list, this seems like a terribly lost opportunity. Sadly, these grants could have helped with our own nursing home, but nobody applied since our consultant, Infinitecare, treats the facility as their own private entity already, although it is still a publicly owned facility.
On a positive note, I’d like to compliment the Commissioner on the readability of the DFS monthly report, and I especially like the information and charts on the housing continuum. On the other hand, why does the ACC omit the overall CMS rating every month? Because it’s still one star. It’s nice to see the activities listed, but why are there no numbers about mortality rates, falls and so on. There is always a list of new hires but never anything about how many staff have left, and the percentage of unfilled positions at the ACC is not included at the end of the report with the vacancies of the other departments. Huge kudos again to the Commissioner for the 2% vacancy rate at DFS! That’s come a long way.