Residents should have their rights upheld and receive safe, adequate, dignified care services.
VOYCE Supports:
- Care that reflects residents’ needs and wishes.
- Improvements to strengthen person-centered care plans.
- Greater access to mental and physical health care services.
- Enhanced resident control, empowerment, autonomy, and dignity.
- Increased implementation and effectiveness of resident councils.
- Efforts to improve quality of care and resident safety.
- Implementation of safeguards against unnecessary medications and treatments.
- Reduced resident social isolation.
- Decreased use of antipsychotic drugs.
- Enhanced requirements for pandemic and emergency preparedness.
- Efforts to reduce preventable emergency department visits.
Long-term care facilities should have sufficient, sustainable staffing and an adequately trained workforce to support residents’ well-being.
VOYCE Supports:
- Implementation of minimum staffing standards
- Competitive wages and benefits for clinical facility staff
- Enhanced training opportunities for facility staff
- Strengthening and diversifying the long-term care workforce
- Expanding affordable CNA career pathways
Long-term care facilities should have oversight and accountability of regulation and enforcement.
VOYCE Supports:
- Accountability for improper, unsafe, or substandard care.
- Meaningful facility monitoring, comprehensive surveys, and timely complaint investigations
- Addressing deficiencies in quality assurance and oversight.
- Enhanced monitoring of Special Focus Facilities.
- Adequately funded and staffed state surveying agencies.
- Enhanced training for state surveyors.
- Increased transparency and disclosure of the financial relationships between nursing homes and related parties.
Residents and families should be able to make informed decisions by having easy access to accurate and transparent data.
VOYCE Supports:
- Transparency and accountability of nursing home ownership, including private equity-backed nursing homes.
- Publicly available data on facility surveys, finances, discharges, occupancy, staffing levels, resident deaths, and ownership.
Community leaders should prioritize culture change and redesigning long-term care.
VOYCE Supports:
- The transition of residents to the least restrictive environment when appropriate.
- Greater support services for those returning to community living.
- Reduced resident room crowding by prioritizing private rooms and bathrooms for all residents.
- The redesign of facilities to promote resident privacy, well-being, safety, and sense of home.
- Enhanced resources for conversion to household care models or smaller home-like environments
Funding and resources should be strategically appropriated to incentivize quality care and reduce health disparities.
VOYCE Supports:
- Enhanced funding of the Long-Term Care Ombudsman Program
- Reimbursement rates that meet federal requirements for person-centered care
- Medicaid payments tied to clinical staff wages and benefits.
- Incorporating relevant workforce metrics and quality measures in Medicaid incentive payment models.
- Enhanced penalties to facilities that continue to deliver substandard care.
Residents and families should have accessible, inclusive, and equitable access to quality long-term care.
VOYCE Supports:
- Efforts to reduce or prevent discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, ability, sexuality, gender identity, religion, or age.
- Equitable access to care options, including increased attention to services in rural, inner city, and low-income areas.
- Quality care for minority communities
- Elimination of admissions-based discrimination