Nursing Homes and Medical Care

Report Outline
New Importance of the Nursing Home
Difficulty of Improving Care at Homes
Programs for Upgrading Nursing Homes

New Importance of the Nursing Home

Role in the Improvement of Medical Care

Nationwide efforts are under way to improve the quality of care given at nursing homes. If nursing homes are to become an integral part of the network of institutions sustaining the health of the community, as now seems indicated, they obviously must meet certain standards. To this end, the American Medical Association is cooperating with the American Nursing Home Association on a program for accreditation of the homes.

At the same time, insurance companies are pushing for professionalization of nursing homes. Health insurance policies could then be regularly written to include nursing home services along with hospitalization among benefits to policy-holders. Many proprietors of nursing homes are willing cooperators in all these efforts, for they are eager to correct the popular impression of such institutions as dismal places of refuge for the senile and infirm.

Nursing homes have been attracting increasing public attention for more than a decade. The chief reason is that the number of persons who need some nursing care but who are not sick enough to be hospitalized has been growing. Nursing homes, moreover, fit the modern medical concept of “progressive care.” Under that concept a nursing home would be utilized routinely as a post-hospitalization facility for persons recovering from acute illness or surgery.