Association between traditional nursing home quality measures and two sources of nursing home complaints.

Objective: To test for an association between traditional nursing home quality measures and two sources of resident- and caregiver-derived nursing home complaints.

Data Sources: Nursing home complaints to the North Carolina Long-Term Care Ombudsman Program and state certification agency from October 2002 through September 2006 were matched with Online Survey Certification and Reporting data and Minimum Data Set Quality Indicators (MDS-QIs).

Study Design: We examine the association between the number of complaints filed against a facility and measures of inspection violations, staffing levels, and MDS-QIs.

Complaints against nursing homes: comparing two sources of complaint information and predictors of complaints.

Purpose Of The Study: Two consumer-derived measures of nursing home quality that have been underutilized by researchers are consumer complaints to the state certification agency between inspections and complaints to the Long-Term Care Ombudsman Program. This article describes these complaints, considers facility-level predictors of complaints, and examines how complaints to the 2 entities are related.

Design And Methods: This article uses North Carolina complaint data from the state certification agency and Ombudsman from 2002 to 2006.