‘No quick fix.’ The Herald-Leader has reported on KY nursing home problems for many years
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Kentucky’s nursing home inspection backlog
Herald-Leader investigation shows more than half of Kentucky’s 269 nursing homes have gone two or more years since their last “annual” survey.
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‘They didn’t care.’ KY still faces huge backlog of long-overdue nursing home inspections
A new rule will make nursing homes hire more staff to improve care. Kentucky opposes it.
‘No quick fix.’ The Herald-Leader has reported on KY nursing home problems for many years
What to look for when you’re picking a nursing home in KY (Hint: Location is key)
The Lexington Herald-Leader has reported on problems in Kentucky nursing homes for many years.
Unfortunately, the biggest problem — a lack of adequate staff on duty to care for vulnerable residents — has never been resolved.
“Nearly half of Kentucky’s nursing homes are rated as substandard by the federal government,” the newspaper reported in 2018 as part of a package of investigative stories about abuse, neglect and political connections in the nursing home industry. “A big problem is inadequate staffing that puts residents in harm’s way.”
Some state lawmakers responded as the late state Sen. Tom Buford, R-Nicholasville, did a few months after the stories were published, with bills to require nursing homes to hire a certain number of nurses and nursing assistants, depending on how many people live there.
But those bills were opposed by the nursing home industry. They went nowhere.
In fact, as the Herald-Leader reported in 2019, the nursing home industry has enough clout at the state Capitol to help write bills that benefit it, including proposed limits on state inspections of their facilities and on the lawsuits they face after things allegedly go wrong.
When Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear organized his first administration in 2020, the Herald-Leader revealed he picked Adam Mather, vice president of a nursing home chain, to serve as the inspector general at the Health and Family Services Cabinet, the state’s official nursing home watchdog.
Mather left his state post this year to become president of the state’s largest nursing home industry lobbying organization.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the Herald-Leader reported on the thousands of people sickened or killed as the virus spread through Kentucky nursing homes, even as state health inspectors said they were finding very few infection control deficiencies.
In July 2023, the newspaper explained that it wasn’t just nursing homes that had too few employees to get the job done. The state health cabinet likewise, since the pandemic, was struggling with the country’s highest vacancy rate for nursing home inspectors.
The inspectors quit in droves because of low pay, long hours and burnout.
Largely as a result of the inspector shortage, the annual state inspections of Kentucky nursing homes that are supposed to catch problems before people are sickened, injured or killed were delayed for years, the newspaper reported. By summer 2023, roughly three in every four Kentucky nursing homes had gone two or more years since their last so-called “annual” inspection.
After the Herald-Leader published its stories about the inspection backlog, state legislators held a hearing in Frankfort to ask the Beshear administration for answers. Mather and his boss, Health Secretary Eric Friedlander, acknowledged the dire situation.
“There’s no quick fix on this. It’s gonna take us, if we’re lucky, a year to dig out of this,” Friedlander testified.
We weren’t lucky.
A year later, in October 2024, the Herald-Leader returned to the subject.
For its latest stories, the newspaper discovered that the inspection backlog slowly is shrinking, but more than half of the state’s nursing homes still haven’t had an annual inspection in at least the last two years.
Some haven’t been properly inspected since before the 2020 pandemic.
When inspectors make their belated returns to the nursing homes, they’re sometimes finding serious problems, including residents left in their own urine and feces or who are victims of crimes like theft and assault while lying in bed.
Also, the Herald-Leader is reporting that a new federal rule will require most nursing homes to hire more staff, starting in May 2026. But Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman is challenging the rule, joining a lawsuit in Iowa along with 19 other states and assorted nursing home industry groups.
To report its latest stories, the newspaper compiled inspection data; reviewed many hundreds of pages of state inspection reports for dozens of facilities from the past few years, as well as other public documents, such as lawsuits and police reports; and interviewed health-care experts, lawyers and the families of nursing home residents.
There were obstacles to our reporting.
The health cabinet denied the Herald-Leader’s Kentucky Open Records Act request for documents related to staff meetings about the inspection backlog and related correspondence with the director of the Division of Health Care. The newspaper appealed that denial to the attorney general’s office.
The appeal is pending.
Likewise, the health cabinet officials chiefly responsible for nursing home inspections declined multiple requests to be interviewed.
The nursing homes mentioned in the latest stories either did not respond to requests for comment or declined to comment. The Kentucky Association of Health Care Facilities, which lobbies for the nursing home industry in Frankfort, also did not respond to requests for comment.
Part of the Herald-Leader mission is to protect the most vulnerable in the commonwealth, said Executive Editor Richard Green.
“John Cheves, our senior investigative reporter, has led our coverage of nursing home inspections and the conditions in which so many Kentuckians now live. He’ll continue to dig,” Green said.
“We’ll continue to be vigilant. We’ll continue to ask tough questions. We’ll continue to invest hours reviewing public records. And if state employees aren’t doing their job, we’ll report that, too.”
This story was originally published December 9, 2024 at 4:45 AM.
