Gladys Peeples, admissions coordinator: Barb Follum, director of Nursing Services, Thelma Ellwood, manager, Business Office; Donna Walters, assistant director, Nursing Services; Cindy McClain, director, Quality/Performance Improvement; Faye Hadaway, coordinator, Quality of Life; Dianne Hill, director, Activities/Therapeutic Recreation; and
Marilyn Biddle, director, Environmental Services. Not shown are Nina Kennedy, director, Food Services, and Don Peeples, manager, Plant Operations.
Congratulations to University of Maryland Shore Nursing and Rehabilitation Center for the Center’s recent achievement of a five-star rating from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
“The Five Star Rating from CMS is well deserved recognition for all of our Center staff who have worked so hard to provide excellent care to our residents and patients,” says Stu Seitz, director of the Center. “We have a terrific team who work well together and who have maintained very high standards for every aspect of the resident/patient experience in our Center.”
The CMS five star rating is not easy to achieve – in fact, very few of the 220 long term care facilities in Maryland earned five stars this year. “This makes me even more proud of this accomplishment and more grateful to every staff member in the Center – the administrative team, our nurses and geriatric nursing assistants, our admissions, business office, social work and activities staff, the rehabilitation team, and our dining/nutrition services, environmental services and plant operations staff,” Seitz says.
CMS created the Five-Star Quality Rating System to help consumers, their families and caregivers compare nursing homes more easily. The Nursing Home Compare website (https://www.medicare.gov/nursinghomecompare/search.html?) features a quality rating system that rates every skilled nursing facility, including an overall rating and separate ratings based on the following:
- Health Inspections – The health inspection rating contains information from the last three years of onsite inspections, including both standard surveys and any complaint surveys. This information is gathered by trained inspectors who go onsite to determine the extent to which a nursing home has met Medicaid and Medicare’s minimum quality requirements.
- Staffing – The staffing rating has information about the number of hours of care provided on average to each resident each day by nursing staff, factoring in differences in the levels of residents’ care need in each nursing home. A nursing home with residents who had more severe needs would be expected to have more nursing staff than one where the resident needs were not as high.
- Quality Measures (QMs) – The quality measure rating has information on 11 different physical and clinical measures and now includes information about the use of anti-psychotic medications in both long-stay and short-stay residents. The QMs offer information about how well nursing homes are caring for their residents’ physical and clinical needs.