A Lexington Herald-Leader investigation found that despite a slow reduction of a backlog of pandemic-era annual nursing home inspections in Kentucky, the state still has a long way to go, John Cheves reports for the Herald-Leader. “While state health inspectors struggle to catch up, Kentucky nursing home residents have been assaulted, robbed and neglected in urine-soaked sheets, public records show,” Cheves writes in an over-3,000- word story. “The federal government in August issued a 50-state report card — known as the State Performance Standards System — showing that Kentucky failed to meet eight of 13 performance measures, including getting its nursing home inspections done on time; following up on serious hazards known as “immediate jeopardies”; and properly responding to complaints from residents and their families,” he reports. “That tells you that (nursing home) residents in Kentucky aren’t getting the protection they’re supposed to be getting, that surveyors aren’t going in there as often as they’re supposed to be and doing the investigations we need them to do to catch the problems that put people in harm’s way,” Toby Edelman, senior policy attorney with the Center for Medicare Advocacy, told Cheves. Cheves reports that a review of federal health data found that in October, more than half of the state’s 269 nursing homes, or 53%, had gone two or more years without an “annual” inspection; in July 2023, Cheves reports the number was 73%. And, he writes, some nursing homes had not been inspected since March 2020. “For instance, the 165-bed Signature Healthcare at Summerfield Rehab & Wellness Center in Louisville went nearly 52 months between annual inspections — from October 2019, when state surveyors cited it for six health deficiencies, to January 2024, when surveyors finally returned to identify 17 health deficiencies and levy a $12,038 fine,” he writes. Cheves reports that officials in charge of the inspections declined multiple requests to be interviewed. Further, he writes, that  documents related to weekly meetings about the inspections, that CMS had been told were taking place, were not able to be located through an open records request. And, he adds, Adam Mather, who spent four years as Kentucky’s inspector general under Gov. Andy Beshear, did not respond to a request for comment about the state’s inspection backlog. “In a prepared statement, Beshear’s office said his administration is aware of the inspection backlog and takes it seriously,” Cheves writes. Cheves goes on to dig into what the inspectors found in seven nursing homes. For example, he writes: “Clifton Heights in Louisville, which, in July 2021, put a diabetic, incontinent, depressed, wheelchair-dependent resident in a taxi and discharged him to a nearby homeless shelter with no medicine, food or money, and without informing the resident’s legal guardian or doctor, according to an inspection report.” He then reports in great detail about how the inspection system broke down during the pandemic, and about  job vacancies that are ongoing. Cheves wraps up the story by talking to two families about their experiences at the Mills Nursing & Rehabilitation in Mayfield, a one-star facility on the CMS’s Nursing Home Compare website. “When they knew they were going to be inspected, they’d be up on their toes,” Rose Dismore, who is suing Mills for negligence and wrongful death in Graves Circuit Court over the 2021 death of her 51-year-old brother, Terry Ray Crawford, told Cheves. “Otherwise, they didn’t care.” The post Herald-Leader investigation finds Ky. health inspectors still behind in annual nursing home inspections appeared first on The Lexington Times.