Nursing Home Closures and Quality of Care

The purpose of this research is to examine the relationship between quality of care in nursing homes and their likelihood of closure. We hypothesize that lower-quality facilities will be more likely to close than higher-quality facilities. Using the rates of physical restraint use, urethral catheterization, contractures, pressure ulcers, and psychotropic medication use as quality measures from approximately 12,000 facilities from 1992 to 1998, the author examine cross-sectional and change score relationships between these measures and a nursing home’s likelihood of closure. The descriptive analysis shows that 621 nursing homes closed in this time period, and the results for physical restraint use were robust in their positive association with closures in most analyses lending some support for this study’s hypothesis. However, overall, the author concludes that nursing facility closures are relatively rare events. And the likelihood of closure, even for poor-quality facilities, is low.