Long-term health care facilities: inspections.

Existing law, the Long-Term Care, Health, Safety, and Security Act of 1973 (act) , generally requires the State Department of Public Health to license and regulate long-term health care facilities and to establish an inspection and reporting system to ensure that long-term health care facilities are in compliance with state statutes and regulations. The term "long-term health care facility" includes, among others, skilled nursing facilities. The act declares the intent of the Legislature to execute these inspections in the form of a single survey process, to the extent possible and permitted under federal law. Existing law requires the department to conduct annual inspections, without notice, of long-term health care facilities, except those facilities that have not had serious violations within the previous 12 months, and in any case to inspect every facility at least once every 2 years. Existing law further requires the department to vary the cycle for conducting these inspections to reduce their predictability. Existing law requires inspections and investigations of long-term health care facilities that are certified by the federal Medicare Program or the Medicaid program to determine compliance with federal standards and California statutes and regulations to the extent that state statutes and regulations provide greater protection to residents, or are more precise than federal standards. Existing federal law requires nursing facilities certified to participate in those federal programs to be subject to a standard survey by the state, conducted without prior notice to the facility, at least every 15 months, as prescribed. This bill would extend the maximum period between inspections of a skilled nursing facility from 2 years to 30 months and would delete obsolete references to a health facility inspections program. The bill would also make technical, nonsubstantive changes.