The Older Americans Act

Access to and Utilization of the Ombudsman Program Gao ID: PEMD-92-21 May 6, 1992

To make its June 1991 testimony on the long-term care ombudsman program more widely available, GAO has published its remarks as a blue cover report. In that testimony, GAO discussed (1) program objectives; (2) the program's impact and data being collected to measure that impact; (3) how well the program was being utilized by residents of nursing homes and board and care facilities; and (4) what difficulties ombudsmen experienced in gaining access to nursing home and board and care residents. GAO recommends that the Administration on Aging modify the annual data collection instrument to require the collection of information on the total number of complaints received by type of facility and the total number of residents. Because ombudsmen have encountered legal barriers in gaining access to facilities and residents' medical and social files, Congress may wish to pass legislation explicitly granting ombudsmen access to facility administrative records.

GAO found that: (1) the ombudsman program's objective is to remove impediments to residents' well-being, safety, welfare, and rights; (2) to achieve that objective, the program must increase residents' program awareness, foster open communication and access between residents and ombudsmen, and resolve a high percentage of complaints; (3) AOA is not collecting appropriate data to measure the program's impact and needs to develop a standard definition of what constitutes complaint resolution; (4) the extent to which eligible residents use the program varies across states; and (5) although legal barriers to access to nursing home and board and care facility residents have greatly diminished since 1987, some state laws do not provide ombudsmen with access to such facilities' administrative records. GAO also appended a testimony it presented in June 1991 regarding the utilization and impact of the AOA ombudsman program.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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