UC Irvine

Objectives

To assess (1) the relationship of consumers' assessment of overall nursing home quality to their assessment of specific dimensions of quality; and (2) the implications of this relationship for composite quality measures in Nursing Home Compare.

Design

A survey conducted in 2017 elicited respondents' assessments of the quality of overall care and 13 specific dimensions of care.

Settings and participants

The sample consisted of 4449 respondents who either resided in a nursing home or had a family member who resided in a nursing home during the 6 months before the survey.

Methods

We estimated regression models to infer the relationship between consumers' assessments of overall quality and 13 specific dimensions of quality. The regression coefficients, indicating the implicit importance/weight assigned by respondents to each dimension as a component of the consumers' assessment of overall quality, were used to create a prototype composite quality measure.

Results

For long-stay residents, 8 of the 13 quality dimensions were significantly associated with their overall ratings of quality. Five dimensions achieved significance for short-stay residents. The magnitude of importance weights varied substantially across dimensions of care.

Conclusions and implications

Our findings suggest that Nursing Home Compare could be improved by augmenting the technical information in the 5-Star composite measure with consumers' assessments of the additional, nontechnical dimensions of quality.