National Survey on Nursing Homes

A new national survey by The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and the Harvard School of Public Health finds that Americans see an important role for nursing homes in providing care for those not able to care for themselves, yet they also voice significant concerns about the care provided in nursing homes. People who have had substantial experience with a friend or family member in a nursing home, or who have themselves been in a nursing home, have generally positive views about the care provided. However, an important minority of those with experience say that the person they know has received poor quality care in the nursing home, with around a quarter reporting that the resident they know has been abused and a quarter reporting that the resident has been overmedicated.

The public's attitudes about nursing homes are mixed. Around a third says nursing homes are doing a good job serving health care consumers, around a third says they are doing a bad job, and the rest say they do a mixed job or that they don't know. Furthermore, six in ten Americans see an important role for nursing homes in providing affordable, round-the-clock care to people who need it. Yet on the other hand, majorities of the public believes that nursing homes are/or have:

• Understaffed
• Staff are often poorly trained
• At least some nursing home residents are abused and neglected
• Many residents do not have enough privacy and cannot rely on the safety of their belongings
• Many residents are lonely

 About half of Americans would be reluctant to move into a nursing home if they could not take care of themselves at home. The vast majority of the public believes that most people who enter a nursing home never go home, and nearly half the public believes that being in a nursing home makes people worse off than they were before coming to the nursing home.

The vast majority of Americans say they are familiar with both nursing homes and assisted living facilities. However, people are more likely to have heard, read, or seen a news story about nursing homes than about assisted living facilities in the last year. Most Americans recognize that care in a nursing home or assisted living facility is expensive, and that long-term care can sometimes lead to bankruptcy. A majority of Americans knows that the government currently regulates nursing homes.

However, there is also confusion about long-term care issues, with the majority of Americans saying they don't know where they would go for advice or information about long-term care, and with many Americans unsure about the role the government programs Medicare and Medicaid play in covering part of peoples long-term care costs.