Flashback With Jack

4 years have elapsed since the noted re-introduction of the known federal long lasting initiative to enforce the nationwide legislature dealing with protection of the elderly, disabled, and patients with special needs receiving care within the systems of home health care, assisted living facilities and nursing homes in effort to establish the best possible practices in elderly frail patient abuse prevention. 13 July 2005 another move was made to introduce a piece of legislature called the “Patient Abuse Prevention Act” that had been worked upon since before 1997, meaning to provide for the development and implementation of the national background check system to exclude the very possibility of unsuitable people with a background history of violent or sex related offences getting job within the elderly health care field, considering the that history may not be always traced through public records held across the USA by numerous repositories of court and police files.

As it had been repeatedly noted by public activist groups, the then existing federal and state level laws failed to warrant the prevention of both neglect and abuse of patients from behalf of some health care workers entrusted with the duty of taking care of the elderly and disabled patients. Even if under the legislature of the time the states were already obligated to ensure the due maintenance of nurse aide registries, rather often the said registries failed to be complete, up to date, or maintained in an effective manner. As an alternative some of the elderly health care agencies would just resort to screening their employees and applicants for a position of a care professional against general databases of the public records available. From the other hand the law makers had to recognize that the majority of states kept only registries of nursing home aides, while the aids employed in home health and hospice systems would stay outside of any formal registry. Speaking further, the public believed it was disturbing that the majority of states didn’t even have a uniform procedure ensuring and regulating criminal background check at regular intervals on workers that had had a record of working in the elderly health care on a permanent or extended term basis.

Another issue that would motivate concerns was the absence of any federally imposed uniform guidelines that would legally mandate compiling a centralized database to be used for inter-state exchange of background information covering employees and workers who were known to have been involved in abusing patients they were supposed to take care of. The few states that did share information of the sort lacked standard joint policies providing for doing that regularly and efficiently. Many admitted that the irregular background screenings they performed using the nurse aid registries sometimes even failed to reveal the facts of charges contained in public records like court orders.

The federal level initiative was intended to create a national registry of abusive health care workers and set up the mandatory standardized procedure of performing criminal background check on the existing or prospective elderly health care employees, as well as on the volunteers working in the field. The use of such nationwide repository of the information of abusers that were caught within the health care industry would prevent them from getting a new job in a different state or by simply moving from a nursery home to home health agency or hospital, or vice versa. The bill suggested that no employment within elderly care trade should be allowed without checking applicant against the public records contained within the national registry to be compiled. The bill also suggested that if the registry based background check revealed no information on a specific person, then the hiring facility would be mandated to order a fingerprint based FBI background check. Senator Kohl’s initiative resulted in a positive reaction from many elderly care facilities, organizations, and public projects, including the influential American Association of Homes and Services for the Aging (AAHSA) that announced its support for the Patient Abuse Prevention Act in public media. Later it was joined by the Elder Justice Coalition, the National Citizen’s Coalition for Nursing Home Reform, AARP and many other organizations striving to protect vulnerable citizens. The next move to ammend the legislature took place in 2007.

Filed under: Business by Admin