Budget cuts reducing nursing home advocate program

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Thought this was of interest: Budget cuts to reduce nursing home advocate program - Springfield, IL - The State Journal-Register

Some of the sickest and loneliest Illinoisans may suffer the most when state budget cuts scheduled to take effect Oct. 1 reduce the number of trained advocates who visit nursing homes to expose and prevent abuse and neglect.

“We’ve always been under-funded, but this will be brutal,” said Robyn O’Neill, president of the Illinois Association of Long-Term Care Ombudsmen.
Funding for the state’s long-term care ombudsman program, which received $2.34 million in state and federal funds during the past year, will drop to $1.9 million over the next 12 months because of state government’s financial crisis.

The ombudsman program operates with 50 to 60 part- and full-time advocates employed at not-for-profit agencies around the state. Most ombudsmen earn less than $42,000 a year, said Sally Petrone, an Illinois Department on Aging employee who oversees the statewide program.

Petrone said the 19 percent funding cut will result in layoffs and reductions in staff hours for people who regularly visit facilities, talk with residents and act as frontline watchdogs over an industry that serves more than 100,000 residents in 1,500 Illinois nursing homes, assisted-living and supportive-living centers.

The number of available volunteers — who currently number 225 statewide — also will drop, Petrone said, and, with oversight reduced, “the level of care will go down.”

“Services for residents are going to be drastically cut because we’re not going to get this money,” said Brigit Dyer-Reynolds, a Springfield-based regional ombudsman whose office has two full-time and two part-time workers. “Every time we go in a nursing home, I really think we are helping residents, and I think we may be saving someone’s life.”

Officials from the Health Care Council of Illinois, which represents the nursing-home industry, were unavailable for comment on the funding cut.
O’Neill’s group wrote letters last week to Gov. Pat Quinn and Aging Director Charles Johnson, asking that funding be restored. Dyer-Reynolds contacted state Sen. Deanna Demuzio, D-Carlinville, who wasn’t optimistic.

“A lot of social services are being cut,” Demuzio said. “I don’t know what we can do, but it’s on a list.”

O’Neill wrote to Johnson that “the regular presence of an ombudsman is vitally important, especially for residents who are unable to call us themselves and do not have friends or family to advocate on their behalf.

“Every day, ombudsmen encounter residents who are in a wet bed, are in pain, need help to the bathroom, need personal care, need help eating, and it is the ombudsmen who advocate with facility staff to make sure the resident receives the care she needs.”

The biggest portion of the scheduled cut — $400,000 — will take place because Quinn’s Department of Public Health has decided to reduce the amount of money the ombudsman program receives in federal fines paid by nursing homes.

For the past seven or eight years, the ombudsman program has received $750,000 a year in federal fine revenues. Public Health decided to reduce that to $350,000.

Public Health made the $400,000 cut partly because the agency needed $200,000 for a fund that helps Public Health take control of troubled nursing homes and investigate deaths and sexual assaults in facilities, according to Bill Bell, Public Health’s acting deputy director for health-care regulation.

Bell said the other $200,000 of the $400,000 cut is being made because the amount of federal-fine revenue available has dropped in recent years.
In addition, he said, state contracts with other not-for-profit organizations will tie up another $500,000 in federal-fine money this year.

Dyer-Reynolds said it’s unfair that the state is cutting the ombudsman program’s share of federal-fine revenue by more than half while the other programs aren’t seeing any cuts in that revenue.

Public Health spokeswoman Melaney Arnold said the state doesn’t have a contract with the ombudsman program but does have contracts with the other programs, which work to improve dental care in nursing homes, make facilities more “home-like,” improve vision care and improve communication between residents and caregivers.

Arnold said reducing those programs’ funding would put the state at risk of being sued.

Arnold said Public Health officials regret any harm the cuts may do to regional ombudsman programs.

“We realize how valuable they are and how critical they are to quality care,” she said. “But our hands are tied. We hate to see this happen, but people are being hit by cuts across various state agencies.”