Report 2007-121 Recommendations

To promptly resolve complaints it receives against the Veterans Home, Public Health should monitor its system for processing complaints.

To meet the requirements of federal ADA regulations, the Veterans Home should develop and update as needed a plan that identifies areas of noncompliance and includes the appropriate steps and milestones for achieving full compliance.

In addition, the Veterans Home should develop grievance procedures and identify a specific employee as its ADA coordinator.

To improve its ability to fill vacancies in key occupations, the Veterans Home should develop a comprehensive plan for recruitment and retention that establishes goals and strategies for reducing chronic vacancy rates and sets timelines and monitoring activities to keep recruiting efforts on track. To maximize its efforts to recruit high-need staff, the Veterans Home should ensure that the recruitment efforts of all its departments are coordinated through a centralized position or program. In addition, the Veterans Home should implement the remaining steps it has currently identified to better recruit and retain health care staff.

To prevent its nursing staff from working excessive overtime, the Veterans Home should consider adopting a formal policy for distributing overtime more evenly among nurses, establishing a cap on how much overtime nursing staff may work, and monitoring overtime usage for compliance with these policies.

If Veterans Affairs is concerned that its ability to serve California veterans is limited by a regulation stating that less than 75 percent of skilled nursing beds must be occupied before it can admit new patients directly to that level of care, it should consider changing or eliminating that regulatory requirement.

To help ensure that newly hired employees at the Veterans Home can start work as soon as possible, the Veterans Home should monitor its new process for completing preemployment physicals. If the process is not resulting in new employees starting work more quickly, the Veterans Home should consider contracting with a vendor to provide the physicals.

To bolster recruitment efforts at the Veterans Home, Veterans Affairs should continue to develop its department-wide recruiting plan and oversee the recruiting plan the Veterans Home is implementing to ensure that it meets department-wide goals.

To ensure the Veterans Home’s medical equipment is maintained as prescribed by the equipments’ manufacturers, the Veterans Home should take the steps necessary to ensure the medical equipment inventory, on which maintenance activities are based, is accurate.

To ensure payments to the maintenance contractor are appropriate, the Veterans Home should require the contractor to provide records of inspections and maintenance work performed prior to authorizing these payments.

To ensure that complaints against the Veterans Home are processed so there is accountability in the complaint resolution process, Veterans Affairs should enforce its policy of using routing slips with complaints.

To appropriately address issues raised at resident council meetings, the Veterans Home needs to better document such issues, ensure that the relevant department resolves them, and promptly communicate resolutions to all members.

To handle alleged violations of the code of conduct consistently and equitably, the Veterans Home should ensure that staff responsible for investigating the allegations completely document the investigations and their results.

To ensure that members of the Veterans Home receive treatment for drug abuse when necessary, staff of the Veterans Home should follow its policy to refer members who use illegal drugs to the drug treatment program.

To ensure that all complaints against the Veterans Home submitted to the Veterans Board are promptly resolved, the Veterans Board should specify a time frame for resolving complaints in its new policy for complaint resolution and ensure it implements the policy.