A nursing home's quality of care does not improve with the amount of times they have been sued for negligence, according to a new study.
Researchers who worked on the study, published in the March 31 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, analyzed data from five of the largest nursing home chains across the U.S. They looked at the reason behind all lawsuits brought again the nursing homes between 1998 and 2006 and found that although each nursing home was sued, on average, once every two years, patient care did not improve.
"Nursing homes that are at the very top of the heap in terms of quality don't experience that much less litigation than nursing homes that are at the bottom of the heap," David Studdert, study leader and law professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia, said in a statement. "It's not clear that by improving your quality dramatically you will lessen your risk of being sued."
Data from the study also show that higher quality nursing homes were just as likely to be sued as nursing homes considered to be of lower quality. According to David Stevenson, study co-author and associate professor at Harvard Medical School, this presents a problem because higher quality nursing homes should, in theory, have higher standards for patient care and thus face less lawsuits.
"The results are sobering," Stevenson said. "One of the fundamental things that the risk of a malpractice claim is supposed to spur is deterring poor quality care. What we found was that the return on being a high-quality facility relative to a low-quality facility isn't great."
Studdert adds that although their study was solely focused on nursing homes, it is possible that the same types of things are happening within the secondary healthcare division as well.
