Task force chief sets timetable for key proposals to end violence
The final report of Gov. Pat Quinn’s Nursing Home Safety Task Force, issued early Friday morning, for the first time sets out an urgent timetable and concrete road map for a sweeping overhaul of the state’s troubled long-term care system.
The proposals are aimed at reversing Illinois’ decades-long practice of housing psychiatric patients and convicted felons in nursing homes — and ending a legacy of violence in which elderly and disabled people have been raped, assaulted and even murdered inside the facilities.
The 52-page report represents a significant advance from preliminary recommendations issued last month by the task force, which was prompted by an ongoing series of investigative reports in the Chicago Tribune.
The report outlines a plan to segregate the most dangerous residents in more secure settings, and to move thousands of mentally disabled people from nursing homes into an array of smaller residential programs that provide intensive therapy and supervision for those who require it, but greater independence for those who don’t.
While the task force argues that most of its proposals are cost-neutral or save money, it presses for an increase in nursing home licensing fees to help cover the cost of increased safety enforcement. The short-staffed Public Health Department needs 79 new inspectors, the report said.
Task force chairman Michael Gelder set an April 30 deadline for implementing many of the key reforms, including more rigorous assessments and screening of all potential nursing home residents. Other recommendations would sharply raise the standards of care for nursing facilities, especially those serving people with mental illness; impose heftier fines and license revocations for unsafe homes; and beef up inspections for all of the state’s 1,100 nursing facilities.
State departments have already begun drafting rule and policy changes as well as new legislation, Gelder said.
“I am planning to be very involved because this is a high priority for the governor,” Gelder said. “Certainly by the end of this month we’ll have a legislative package or a single bill.”
While all the initial steps may not be completed by April 30, Gelder said, the “deadline was inserted there to make sure we knew how urgent this was.”
More than any other state, Illinois mixes geriatric and mentally ill nursing home residents, and understaffed facilities have failed to treat and monitor their most violent patients, government records show.
There is no single solution for separating the two populations and ending the violence inside homes, the report acknowledges. Instead, it outlines 38 separate recommendations. Some can be quickly implemented by the governor and 10 state agencies, but others will require legislative action.
Among the final report’s new proposals… < Read More >
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