Long-Term Care Survey Alert

Your QAC may stave off a tag for deficiencies you've fixed.

In some cases, the best defense just might be a good quality assurance offense -- one shared with surveyors.
 
"Some facilities have a policy where they disclose their QA materials to surveyors to show they are aware of and correcting problems," says attorney Kendall Watkins in Des Moines, IA. "There's some support in the State Operations Manual, in fact, for a facility being able to avoid a citation for a past deficiency that was corrected through its QA process before the survey, as long as the deficiency or incident wasn't egregious," he says. 

What Do You Think?

Should a facility that's doing bad quality assurance -- for example, not implementing its corrective actions or allowing the same problem to recur time after time -- be required to turn over its QA materials to surveyors?

See the answer in the next Long-Term Care Survey Alert.