January 20, 2018
The Office if Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services in collaboration with the Administration for Community Living and the HHS Office for Civil Rights, has released it’s long awaited report to Congress.The conclusions drawn were that group home residents are a risk of serious harm – that health and safety policies were not being followed and that these were not isolated incidents, but a systemic problem.. The report includes model practices for compliance oversight for states.
Since we know that DBHDS and DMAS are currently developing the health and safety assurances for the next round of Waiver revisions and that DBHDS is planning on issuing new, emergency, licensing regulations to comply with the quality requirements of DOJ, it is timely to review this report. VNPP will be working on the development of some model policies that will perhaps assist members with bringing their own practices more in line with expectations.
The report can be found here:
https://oig.hhs.gov/reports-and-publications/featured-topics/group-homes/group-homes-joint-report.pdf