Nursing Home Culture Change Practices and Survey Deficiencies: A National Longitudinal Panel Study

Nursing home (NH) adoption of culture change practices has substantially increased in recent decades. We examined how increasing adoption of culture change practices affected the prevalence of health, severe health, and quality of life (QoL) deficiencies.

Novel data on culture change practice adoption from a nationally representative NH panel (N = 1,585) surveyed in 2009/2010 and 2016/2017 were used to calculate change in practice adoption scores in 3 culture change domains (resident-centered care, staff empowerment, physical environment). These data were linked to data on health, severe health, and QoL deficiencies and facility-level covariates. Multinomial logistic regression models, with survey weights and inverse probability of treatment weighting, examined how increased culture change practice adoption related to change in deficiencies.

We generally observed less increase in deficiencies when culture change practices increased. However, after weighting and controlling for baseline deficiencies and culture change scores, we found few statistically significant effects. Still, results show increased physical environment practices resulted in a higher likelihood of decreases or no change (vs increases) in QoL deficiencies; increased resident-centered care practices resulted in decreases or no change (vs increases) in health deficiencies; and increased staff empowerment practices resulted in a higher likelihood of no change (vs increases) in severe health deficiencies.

This study provides some evidence that culture change practices can help reduce the risk of increasing some types of deficiencies, but the impact of increases in each culture change domain related differently to different types of deficiencies.