LOS ANGELES – Recently underfunded and understaffed, the head of Los Angeles County’s Health Facility Inspection program told FactFlyer that the Board of Supervisors’ approval of a contract with the state will help resolve a backlog of complaints for local nursing facilities.
Los Angeles County Supervisors on June 30 approved an agreement from the California Department of Public Health to support the investigation of long-term complaints for health care facilities in Los Angeles County through June 30, 2021.
The contract with the state will increase the county program’s annual budget from $26.9 million to $41.8 million, allowing the county to hire about 70 more workers to perform yearly inspections and investigate complaints.
According to Terri Williams, assistant director for the Environmental Health Division of the county’s Department of Public Health, Los Angeles County has contracted with the state to perform these investigative services since the 1960s.
“About a year and a half ago, we realized we weren’t performing as well as we expected our staff to be performing at,” Williams told FactFlyer. “When we delved into that further, we realized how severely underfunded the program was compared to other state offices. For example, we have 33 percent of the health care facilities in the County of Los Angeles, and we only get 15 percent of the operating budget.”
Williams said the chronic lack of funding led to understaffing, and in turn, led to “less than optimal program operations” from an overburdened staff.
She said the important part of the new contract with the state is that the county’s work will be equal in degree to the funding provided by the state.
“That’s very important because we believe we’re about 50 percent understaffed and underfunded. So with that adequate amount of people doing the workload that is expected of us, we think there’s going to be many benefits to both the facilities and the vulnerable population in the facilities,” she said.
Williams said her division currently conducts routine and annual surveys at the frequency of about 16 months, but plans to reduce that to roughly every 13 months over the next three years.
This will begin to address the backlog of complaints for the county’s Health Facility Inspection program, which currently stands at about 6,000 for nursing homes, according to Williams.
But to clarify the problem, the backlog issue is with closing out the paperwork – not the actual investigations themselves, Williams said.
“By law we are required to get out to the facility depending on the type of complaint it is, either within 24 hours or within 10 days. We’ve done that,” she said. “We investigated the complaints, but then the last step in that is writing it up and closing it out – and that’s the part we were negligent in – not investigating and making sure the risk to the public was taken care of.”
Now with much-needed funding and staffing in place, Williams said she wants her staff to be more responsive to health care facilities, especially the nursing homes.
“They’re required to do some self-recording when there are incidents or specific occurrences within their programs or their facilities,” she said. “And we want to give better response, we want to give better investigations, and we want to timely closeout those investigations, and put them behind us.”
For more information on Los Angeles County’s public health programs, visit PublicHealth.LACounty.gov.
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