Measures of the Problem.

• Author: Lueders, Bill
• Position: Nursing home evictions

HOW OFTEN DO THE PEOPLE WHO RUN NURSING HOMES AND SENIOR CARE FACILITIES BOOT ELDERLY PEOPLE FROM THEIR HOMES?

The truth is that no one knows. While nursing homes have been required since 2017 to notify state Long-Term Care Ombudsmen every time they evict someone, these notifications are often late or incomplete.

On the state level, I tried to obtain statistics on complaints and enforcement actions, largely without success. The best the state's Long-Term Care Ombudsman could do was a barebones tabulation that it has received 306 complaints regarding "discharge or eviction" over the past three years. This number spiked dramatically from 40 in 2019, to 129 in 2020, to 137 in 2021. It said between 56 percent and 70 percent of these complaints were at least "partially" resolved, whatever that means. My request for more detailed records was denied.

The state of Wisconsin runs an online search portal to look up enforcement actions against regulated providers for the prior three years. It does not allow searches for, say, all of the discharge-related citations issued in a given year, only searches for individual providers. When I looked up ProHealth, my main subject of inquiry, nothing came up. I later learned from a department spokesperson that this was because the state has misspelled the name as Pro Health. To get responsive records, you have to use this misspelling. Doing so, I found an enforcement action against New Berlin Regency in 2019 over the lack of staff training in first aid and the facility's emergency plan. Corrective action was required, and a follow-up investigation was conducted.

No deficiencies were reported at either of ProHealth's two other residential senior centers, in Brookfield and Muskego. I tried to get more specific information on discharge-related citations for the state as a whole, but my request of November 18...