January 16, 2025 – The Long Term Care Community Coalition (LTCCC) regularly publishes data on critical indicators of nursing home care, providing valuable insights into the quality, safety, and accountability of these facilities. Today, LTCCC is releasing new federal data on five-star ratings, ownership type, enforcement actions, and other critical information for the nearly 15,000 U.S. nursing homes in the federal CMS dataset.

This report offers user-friendly datasets that can be sorted and filtered to identify nursing homes in a location and/or category (i.e., for-profit nursing homes in Miami, Florida). The datasets contain info on facility ratings, ownership status, health inspection outcomes, family council presence, and many more important categories. We also provide a “Problem Facilities” dataset with facilities that are in the federal Special Focus Facility (SFF) Program, SFF Candidates, or assigned a one-star overall rating.

What’s new?: In this report, we introduce a new methodology for calculating expected nurse staffing to better align with the needs of residents and assess whether operators are providing sufficient staff. Previously, we used the CMS methodology, which compares nursing homes to a national average and normalizes current staffing levels—which are too often inadequate. Starting with this report, we are adopting the evidence-based McLaughlin-Harrington five-star rating methodology, which determines appropriate staffing levels based on residents’ needs as identified by the facilities themselves. More information on this methodology is available at www.nursinghome411.org/nurse-rating-methodology.

Some ways to use this report:

  • View a nursing home’s ratings, citation history, and whether it is staffing up to expected levels based on resident needs.
  • Review a nursing home’s health deficiencies to determine whether an incident is part of a pattern or compare performance indicators for nursing homes with different characteristics (i.e., ownership type, location).
  • Use the slicer and filter features to evaluate nursing homes in a state or one or more counties.

Key findings:

  • One in four U.S. nursing homes (24.8%) is a Problem Facility: one-star nursing homes, SFFs, and SFF Candidates.
  • Nearly three in four nursing homes (72.7%) are for-profit facilities.
  • Among Problem Facilities, 86.0% are for-profit.
  • Average overall ratings vary significantly by state (from 2.22 in Louisiana to 3.68 in Hawaii) and by CMS Region (from 2.59 in Region 6 (Dallas) to 3.15 in Region 9 (San Francisco)).
  • Nearly 9% of facilities have an abuse icon, indicating a history of substantiated abuse or neglect. Note: the absence of an abuse icon does not necessarily mean the absence of abuse at a facility.
  • Only 5.7% of deficiencies were classified as harm or higher, including 2.3% deemed to cause immediate jeopardy. This is significant because facilities are unlikely to face penalties for violations of minimum care standards unless harm or immediate jeopardy is documented by the surveyors.

For more detailed information and to access the report, please visit NursingHome411.org.