By Steven Syre
Resident satisfaction and quality are not the same things in nursing homes, according to new research from a fellow with the LeadingAge LTSS Center @UMass Boston.
Consumers have come to expect easy access to user satisfaction data before making their buying decisions. When buying items online, for example, most of us read through reviews and check out product ratings.
Would similar information be useful to people choosing a nursing home? Do satisfaction ratings from residents and their families simply parallel publicly available quality data on individual nursing homes? Or might satisfaction scores provide information that is missing from reports on quality?
Pamela Nadash, an associate professor at UMass Boston’s McCormack Graduate School, recently led a team of researchers who analyzed satisfaction data from nursing homes with these questions in mind. The answer: While satisfaction ratings align somewhat with other quality ratings, they also capture something different about the nursing home experience.
“Satisfaction surveys are not capturing the same thing other quality measures are capturing,” says Nadash, who is a fellow with the LeadingAge LTSS Center @UMass Boston. “There’s something different about nursing home satisfaction.”
Is Quality Information a Good Predictor of Resident Satisfaction?
Nadash and her co-investigators are planning a series of research projects based on satisfaction data from nursing homes all over the country. They began their research by asking a basic question: Is publicly available quality information a good predictor of resident satisfaction at individual nursing homes? The researchers are currently preparing an article describing that work and the details of their results.
“If satisfaction scores replicate what’s already out there, there’s no point in spending lots of money collecting satisfaction data from nursing home residents, because that’s quite an onerous task,” said Nadash.
Resident and family satisfaction surveys are commonly collected for nursing homes by private vendors. But only 3 states—Minnesota, Maryland, and Ohio—mandate the type of nursing home satisfaction data that is collected and made publicly available.
“There’s no systematic way in which to assess what the consumers themselves think about the nursing home experience,” Nadash said. “It seems crazy that you’re not getting the resident or family perspective on what that experience is like. If you were considering a nursing home, what would you ideally do? You would go and talk to someone who is there.”
Satisfaction and Quality: Not the Same Thing
Using funds from the Donaghue Foundation, researchers examined average satisfaction survey results from individual nursing homes in all 50 states. The data were collected using NRC Health’s MyInnerView product, a survey tool containing 24 satisfaction measures. While NRC Health collects data from about 2,500 nursing homes, not all of that data was included in the study, says Nadash.
The researchers matched resident and family satisfaction information with several forms of nursing home quality data, including Nursing Home Compare’s 5-star quality rating system and deficiency-in-care measures.
Nadash said satisfaction data correlated more closely with the 5-star ratings than it did with deficiency-in-care information. But the overall results clearly indicated that satisfaction and quality are not the same things in nursing homes.
“Our results are very consistent with the notion that satisfaction is a different construct from quality, and it captures something different about the nursing home experience,” said Nadash. “And that different thing is important for people to understand when they’re making a decision about a nursing home.”