'I don't want there to be the fear out there with families that abuse went unaddressed.'īut the GAO auditors repeatedly stressed in their report that CMS and Oregon officials need to fix the problem, so federal regulators can spot patterns of abuse, levy federal penalties and provide the public with complete data on their nursing home website.

'We want Oregonians to understand that the report's not about a failure to respond to or investigate abuse in nursing facilities,' Ashley Carson Cottingham,director of the agency's division of Aging and People with Disabilities, said Tuesday in an interview with the Statesman Journal. Two state-led investigations of two different cases later in 2016 found that the same nursing home failed to prevent a resident from inappropriately touching another resident.Īgency officials said the DHS website offers an alternative to the federal website with more detailed information, including state civil penalties, abuse investigations and survey reports. It means the federal CMS website people use to gauge the quality of care at Oregon nursing homes is incomplete, lacking vital information about a home's track record and previous violations.įurthermore, federal regulators aren’t receiving information they could use to identify nursing homes with patterns of abuse and persistent compliance problems in order to impose sanctions and mandate changes.įor example, in one case, federal regulators cited an Oregon nursing home in March 2016 for being slow to investigate a case of inappropriate sexual contact between two residents, one who was unable to give consent. Government Accountability Office report released this month. This shortcoming directly affects the public and hinders the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which has oversight authority for nursing home safety, according to a U.S. For at least 15 years, the Oregon Department of Human Services has failed to properly collect and report data about nursing home abuse to the federal government.

Cms nursing home compare abuse