Report 2007-121 Summary - April 2008

Veterans Home of California at Yountville: It Needs Stronger Planning and Oversight in Key Operational Areas, and Some Processes for Resolving Complaints Need Improvement

HIGHLIGHTS

Our review of the Veterans Home of California at Yountville (Veterans Home) found that:

RESULTS IN BRIEF

The Veterans Home of California at Yountville (Veterans Home) is one of three veterans homes administered by the California Department of Veterans Affairs (Veterans Affairs). As of December 2007 more than a thousand California veterans were living at the Veterans Home. Veterans Home residents (members) who are self-sufficient have independent-living accommodations if they are able to perform all the activities of daily living without assistance, or assisted-living accommodations if they need minimal assistance with daily activities. For members requiring inpatient health care, the Veterans Home provides services at three levels—intermediate, skilled nursing, and acute—at the N. M. Holderman Memorial Hospital (Holderman Hospital), which is located on the grounds of the Veterans Home. For fiscal year 2007-08 the Veterans Home has 1,037 authorized positions and a budget of $94 million.

Our review of the Veterans Home revealed that it has had difficulty filling key health care positions in recent years, especially nursing positions. During fiscal year 2006-07 about 41 percent of all vacant positions at the Veterans Home were nursing positions. As a result, the Veterans Home has been limited in its ability to serve the veterans community, some nursing staff have worked substantial amounts of overtime to meet staffing guidelines for providing care to members living in the skilled nursing and intermediate care facilities. For example, we determined that although the Veterans Home has sufficient budget-authorized nursing staff to fill 435 beds without the need for substantial overtime, its census shows that as of December 2007 it had only 357 beds filled. Moreover, 20 members of the nursing staff worked an average of more than 20 hours of overtime each week during the last three months of 2007. In addition, although we did not observe such matters at the Veterans Home, one research study we reviewed concluded that excessive overtime by health care workers can lead to medical errors and negative patient outcomes.

We also found that the veterans community has an unmet need for the services of the Veterans Home. In addition to unfilled beds, the Veterans Home maintains a waiting list of veterans seeking admittance. As of January 2008 the Veterans Home had a waiting list of 250 veterans for skilled nursing beds and 220 veterans for intermediate care beds. Although the Veterans Home does not regularly monitor the status of those waiting veterans, the mere existence of the lists indicates a certain level of demand for entry into the home. Further potentially limiting the ability of the Veterans Home to admit veterans into the level of care they need is a regulation stating that less than 75 percent of skilled nursing beds must be occupied before the home can admit members directly to that level of care. Veterans Affairs has suspended that regulation in the past and intends to initiate a regulatory change within six months to grant the administrators the discretion to admit veterans to this level of care while ensuring that existing members have access to skilled nursing beds.

According to the deputy administrator at the Veterans Home (deputy administrator), the home faces two major challenges in recruiting and retaining health care professionals: comparatively low salaries and the high cost of housing in the community. Salaries offered at the Veterans Home are lower than those offered at other state hospitals in the area, primarily because of the salary increases for medical and mental health positions at the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation facilities that resulted from recent federal court decisions. The Veterans Home must also contend with statewide shortages in several high-need health care occupations, such as registered nurses.

Despite these staffing shortages, the Veterans Home has not had a coordinated and comprehensive strategy for filling chronic staff vacancies in especially important occupational areas. Instead, individual departments within the Veterans Home have assumed important recruiting functions, without involvement from the home's human resources department. As a result, the Veterans Home has not been as effective as it could be in conducting recruiting efforts such as advertising vacant positions. It also is not as prompt as it could be in processing successful job applicants so they can start working at the Veterans Home, primarily because the home takes too much time to schedule, perform, and obtain the results of the physical examinations applicants must undergo.

To improve recruitment of health care staff, the Veterans Home has moved to centralize recruiting efforts under its human resources department. In an attempt to lessen the time between candidate job acceptances and employment start dates, the Veterans Home has identified a specific doctor and two nurse practitioners to perform physical examinations. According to the deputy administrator, the Veterans Home plans further action, such as improving the process for advertising open positions, extending outreach to nursing schools, and establishing a more effective exit interview process to gain a better understanding of why employees leave. In addition, the Veterans Home is seeking increased housing assistance for its employees.

Further, Veterans Affairs has taken action to raise salaries in several health care occupations at the Veterans Home and has performed some recruitment activities that might benefit the home. Veterans Affairs is also planning to implement a recruiting program that will coordinate the department's recruiting efforts and require the Veterans Home to develop a local recruitment plan that addresses department-wide recruiting goals.

Our review also revealed that the Veterans Home has weak oversight of its medical equipment contract. From the medical equipment inventory provided to us by the Veterans Home, we tested 31 pieces of equipment and found that one piece of equipment had been entered into the inventory twice, leaving 30 items in our sample. Of those 30 items, six were not in use by the Veterans Home and five new items were not promptly added to the inventory. In addition, for 14 of the 19 remaining items, we could not find evidence that the contractor scheduled or performed the required maintenance within appropriate time frames. Without an accurate inventory and regularly scheduled maintenance of its medical equipment, the Veterans Home risks not having properly functioning equipment readily available when needed. Further, the Veterans Home routinely approves invoices for the contractor responsible for maintaining medical equipment but fails to verify that the contractor has met the requirements of its contract. Consequently, the Veterans Home may be making inappropriate payments to the contractor and, more importantly, it further decreases its assurance that every piece of medical equipment will function properly whenever it is needed to meet a member's health care needs.

In addition, the Veterans Home does not have a plan for fully complying with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Title II of the ADA and federal regulations require state agencies to ensure that people with disabilities are not excluded from services, programs, and activities because buildings are inaccessible. As a first step toward meeting this requirement for program accessibility, all public entities had to conduct self-evaluations of their policies and practices and correct any policies and practices that were inconsistent with the requirements of Title II. Additionally, any public entity needing to make structural changes to achieve program accessibility had to develop a transition plan. According to its equal employment opportunity/civil rights officer, Veterans Affairs has not performed a self-assessment of the Veterans Home for compliance with the ADA. Consequently, neither Veterans Affairs nor the Veterans Home can develop a plan for achieving full compliance with the ADA. The director of residential programs at the Veterans Home said that when repairs and alterations were made to the infrastructure at the Veterans Home, they were done to ADA design codes in force at the time. Nonetheless, it is not clear to what extent the Veterans Home meets the program accessibility requirements of the ADA.

Federal ADA regulations also require state agencies to develop grievance procedures and identify an employee as the agency's ADA coordinator. According to its director of residential programs, the Veterans Home has not met either of those requirements. However, the Veterans Home has made accommodations in its dining hall for members with visual impairments and provided training to dining hall workers to enable them to better serve members with visual impairments.

Our review of complaints lodged against the Veterans Home, including complaints filed with legislative staff, showed that the responsible agencies handled some complaints appropriately. However, in several cases we could not discern from the available documentation whether the proper complaint-handling procedures were followed. For example, we reviewed the nine complaints concerning the Veterans Home filed with the California Department of Public Health (Public Health) between October 2005 and October 2007 and found that in every case Public Health met the requirements to conduct an initial on-site investigation within 24 hours or 10 days of receipt of the complaint, depending on its severity. In addition, Public Health's classification of the severity of each complaint appeared appropriate. However, we noted that Public Health did not complete its investigations for three of the nine complaints within 40 business days, its recommended maximum time frame. For another of the nine complaints, Public Health has yet to make a final determination on whether to issue the Veterans Home a citation, even though the complaint was filed more than one year ago. According to the chief of the state facilities unit in Public Health's licensing and certification program, this complaint was mistakenly dropped from his pending file and not addressed again until it was discussed during our audit.

We also reviewed the 11 complaints against the Veterans Home submitted by members to Veterans Affairs from July 2005 through October 2007. From the review we found that in all 11 cases the complaints were substantively addressed and resolved in the time frame specified by Veterans Affairs policy. However, in four of the cases Veterans Affairs did not follow all its procedures designed to track the complaints and provide accountability for the resolutions. We also reviewed five complaints submitted to the California Veterans Board (Veterans Board) between June 2006 and December 2007 but were unable to determine whether they were resolved appropriately because neither the Veterans Board nor Veterans Affairs could locate documentation concerning actions they took on the complaints. Although the Veterans Board adopted a policy indicating the types of complaints it will process and those it will direct to Veterans Affairs, it did not specify a time frame for resolving the complaints it will process.

As part of our analysis of complaint-handling procedures, we reviewed documents prepared by Veterans Home staff following resident council meetings. These monthly meetings are held in Holderman Hospital and its intermediate care facility annexes to give members the opportunity to raise issues, concerns, and complaints. According to the supervisor of therapeutic activities, the hospital's therapeutic activities staff facilitate the meetings, and social services staff are responsible for taking meeting minutes. We reviewed the available meeting minutes for 2007 and memos prepared by the social services staff from May through December 2007 to communicate to Veterans Home departments the issues they needed to address. Our review revealed that 20 complaints were raised in the 2007 resident council meetings and, as of December 2007, the Veterans Home took reasonable steps to resolve 16 and had been unsuccessful in resolving two. We could not determine whether the Veterans Home had resolved the remaining two issues because no resolution was apparent in the minutes of resident council meetings or in the memos. The Veterans Home had communicated the outcomes of their investigations at subsequent resident council meetings for 14 of the 20 issues and had yet to report their findings for six. When complaints lodged by members in resident council meetings are not promptly resolved, or resolutions of the issues are not communicated to members, it can lead to dissatisfaction among the members of the Veterans Home.

When we attempted to assess the process the Veterans Home has established for handling alleged violations of its code of conduct for members, we found that the Veterans Home did not adequately document its processing of the alleged violations. The code of conduct specifies behaviors prohibited by members to preserve the tranquility of the Veterans Home and to ensure the rights and independence of each member. Our review of 25 violations alleged to have occurred in 2006 and 2007 found complete documentation in only 11 cases. For all 11 cases with complete documentation, we were able to verify that the Veterans Home followed its policies and procedures. In 12 of the 25 cases we reviewed, the Veterans Home did not maintain sufficient documentation for us to determine whether it followed all its policies and procedures. In the remaining two cases, using the limited documentation available to us, we determined that the Veterans Home did not follow appropriate policies and procedures. Without maintaining appropriate documentation, executive staff at the Veterans Home cannot be assured that alleged violations of the code of conduct receive consistent and equitable treatment.

RECOMMENDATIONS

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 for key health care positions, 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 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.

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 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 can work, and monitoring overtime usage for compliance with these policies.

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. In addition, 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 payments.

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

To ensure that all complaints against the Veterans Home submitted to the Veterans Board are properly 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.

To appropriately address complaints raised at resident council meetings, the Veterans Home needs to better document such issues, ensure that the relevant department resolves them, and promptly communicate their 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 fully document the investigations and their results.

AGENCY COMMENTS

Veterans Affairs states that it generally found the report to be accurate and thorough, and expects it to be useful in its efforts to improve processes for accountability and efficiency of its organization. Veterans Affairs offers clarification on several issues we identified in the report.

Public Health agrees with our recommendation regarding its resolution of complaints against the Veterans Home.