Government program offers nursing home information

WASHINGTON -- All that Anna Spinella wanted for her three elderly relatives was a place where they could spend their final years in comfort. Instead, she says she endured a nightmarish experience trying to find good nursing homes for them.

"I went in to see my brother-in-law on Christmas Eve," said Spinella, 68, of Tampa, Fla. "His sheets were sopping wet. He was unshaven. He had not been cared for since I left the day before."

Spinella, who founded Advocates Committed to Improving Our Nursing Homes, moved her relatives several times before she found a facility in St. Petersburg, Fla., she liked.

"They were staffed sufficiently. The food was good. The nursing staff seemed to know what they were doing," she said.

The government hopes to help. A new six-state pilot project is intended to give consumers information that will enable them to compare the quality of nursing homes.

The project will begin Wednesday in Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Ohio, Rhode Island and Washington state. The first ads listing nursing homes and information about them are to appear Thursday in major newspapers in those states.

The ads and online help -- available Thursday at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' Web site -- will give families information on things such as the prevalence of physical restraints at a facility and the frequency with which residents contract new infections. The government will not rate the homes.

The federal agency hopes to take the proposal nationwide in the next year.

"If you don't know anything about nursing homes, you can begin to look at this and say here are some objective data," said Dr. William L. Minnix Jr., president of the American Association of Homes and Services for the Aging. The group represents 5,600 not-for-profit nursing homes.