Kentucky Nursing Home Loses Government Funding
Winchester Centre for Health and Rehabilitation, a 183 bed nursing home facility located in Winchester, Kentucky, has been slapped with a Type A citation, which is the most serious citation Kentucky can assess for alleged abuse and neglect. The federal government has also said that it will terminate Medicare and Medicaid funding for the facility on February 7, 2009. Winchester Centre for Health and Rehabilitation is a one star facility, according to the new rating system instituted by The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid.
The facility refuses to elaborate on why it received the citation, saying only that "they had a problem with "medical errors" and that those problems had been corrected". Kindred Healthcare, the owner of Winchester Centre for Health and Rehabilitation, also refuses to comment.
Loss of federal funding from Medicare and Medicaid is serious and can result in closure of the facility. Losing funding from those sources means that the nursing home will no longer be certified to provide care for people receiving Medicare and Medicaid and patients living at the facility at the time of funding termination will be transferred to other certified facilities. Currently, it is unclear if Winchester Centre for Health and Rehabilitation will close. Other alternatives for the facility could be bringing in new upper management staff to run the facility and levying daily fines until identified problems are corrected.
Kathy Gannoe, the executive director of the Nursing Home Ombudsman Agency of the Bluegrass, said that her agency received 31 complaints in the past three months about Winchester Centre for Health and Rehabilitation. Eighty-six percent of those complaints have been satisfactorily resolved.
