Compliance Perspective – Sexual Abuse:
States vary in what kind of background checks nursing homes can perform regarding potential residents with criminal backgrounds. So, the Compliance Officer needs to be knowledgeable about the state laws where his/her facility is located. The Compliance Officer should review the facility’s policies and procedures regarding the resident’s pre-admission evaluation process with the Human Resources Manager to ensure that it includes the resident’s responses to inquiries about any history of arrest and conviction for certain crimes (robbery, assault, sexual offenses, abuse, etc.). In the case of Sexual Crimes, databases that list registered sex offenders should be checked-particularly for potential mal
e residents. Staff should be educated about the facility’s policy regarding checking the registry for registered sex offenders and the facility’s requirements for additional monitoring. An audit should be developed and implemented to check the responses of residents in their pre-admission evaluations regarding their responses to alert staff to persons who may warrant additional monitoring.
The Department of Health and Human Services Center for Medicare and Medicaid recently made public a survey report that was issued regarding a Wisconsin nursing home. The report done in May 2018, details the violation citations given because the facility failed to prevent a 69-year-old resident who had been convicted and served 5 years in prison for multiple sex crimes and was a registered sex offender from sexually abusing three residents. The man has been charged with “two felony counts of sexual assault and two misdemeanors for abusing an at-risk person.”
The survey report indicated that the nursing home staff failed to monitor the sex offender’s behavior for the first nine months he lived in the nursing home. It also pointed out that the man’s “whereabouts” within the facility were never monitored the entire period of his stay in the facility.
That the resident was a registered sex offender became known only after he was accused of sexually abusing the three residents in the nursing home and an investigation was launched by the police.
The incident has raised concern about whether laws need to be created to protect the elderly regarding registered sexual abusers in much the same way as occurs with children. The state’s sex offender registry is an online database that is accessible to the public. People can search for registrants by name, address, or view a map of sex offenders in their area.
After the arrest of the resident, the nursing home staff received some type of educational training and the nursing home performed criminal backgrounds checks on all of its remaining residents.
