March 1, 2013 – An order approved last week by the Oregon Health Authority will transfer beds to an as-yet-constructed nursing home in northeast Portland from Rose City Nursing Home – but open as a completely different type of facility.
Affected parties have until Monday to request an informal hearing to address their concerns, but the proposal is likely to go through – which will mean the end of operations for Rose City. Where it’s served long-term care patients on Medicaid, the new facility will provide short-term rehabilitative care to patients with injuries such as fractured hips and dislocated shoulders, according to Terri Waldroff, a consultant with Promontory Health Care Management, which is slated to manage the new facility.
But moving beds isn't the same as moving patients. In fact, those occupying the Rose City Nursing Home when the new center opens – probably a year and a half from now, after it's built – will have to move to other long-term care nursing homes.
That's because of the way the certificate of need program works, said Jana Fussell, who coordinates the program for the state's Public Health Division. It's much easier to relocate beds from an existing facility to a new one – provided they stay within the same county – than it is to start from scratch.
Waldroff said the new center will be called Two Rivers Rehabilitation Center. Promontory already manages similar facilities in Boise and Idaho Falls.
Fussell said the Rose City facility is also closing because the building – an older, multilevel house which is only wheelchair-accessible on the first floor – is out-dated and does not meet the needs of people seeking long-term care.
“It's an old facility. It has lots of issues. It really kind of resembles more of a house,” Fussell said, adding she believed the facility had been unable to maintain adequate census due to concerns about the accessibility of the structure.
“It was built in an era when things were very different for nursing homes,” Waldroff said.
Inspection reports also show that Rose City had the most severe quality deficiencies of any nursing home inspected in Oregon during the last three years.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services assigns nursing home deficiencies a letter grade between A and L, with L denoting the most severe offenders. Rose City was the only facility in the state to receive an L-level deficiency in that time period, according to a January 2011 report that found a failure to institute proper abuse training procedures as well as several other problems. More recently, a report dated March 1, 2012 found sanitation issues, medication errors and a failure to complete criminal background checks for new hires, but no issues that merited a fine or would jeopardize the facility's licensure, state officials said.
According to the CMS report, no federal fine was levied, but the Oregon Department of Human Services provided The Lund Report with certified correspondence between DHS and Harry Geistlinger, the home's administrator, showing the state fined Geistlinger $10,000 but only received $6,500. According to Renee Shearer at the DHS Office of Licensing and Regulatory Oversight, the fine was reduced by 35 percent because it was paid before the 60-day deadline.
Geistlinger declined to comment for this story.
Nationwide, Oregon ranks 34th in the number of nursing homes – seven – to have been found with serious deficiencies in the last three years. Its average fine ($1,350) is also among the lowest in the nation, and Oregon is unlikely to suspend new admissions, having done so only four times in the last three years. The little fines stack up, though: the state has brought in $166,000 in nursing home penalties over the past three years.
The new center will focus on short-term care and serve Medicare as well as private-paid patients, Waldroff said.
“There won't be a specific age group that it will care for. I say that it's Medicare but it's not just Medicare. It's actually kind of fun to see some new product coming to Oregon.”
