Report: NY needs to address nursing home pandemic issues
ALBANY, N.Y. (NEWS10)---The New York State’s Comptroller’s Office released a follow up report saying the state still needs to do more to address nursing home pandemic issues. While some of the comptroller’s previous recommendations have been implemented or partially implemented, others have not.
The recent report looked at the use, collection, and reporting of infection control data. Back in 2022, the Comptroller’s office made recommendations to the New York State Department of Health and to the governor, after reviewing how the pandemic was handled.
"The original report found a lot of the data that the department was basically releasing to the public was not fully transparent," explained Tina Kim, Deputy Comptroller for State Government Accountability. "So, the numbers that they had internally were not the numbers that were being publicly released, and so they were under reporting the number of deaths."
One recommendation was to improve the quality of data released to the public, as well as collect supplemental data from other sources. The new report found this was partially implemented by the department of health.
"The other thing that we really looked at is, there needs to be improvement related to the accuracy of the data they actually do collect, and how they use that data," said Kim. "I think that we all talk about data driven decision making, but one of the things is, they have a lot of data, but they’re not using it to make decisions."
According to the report, the health department lacked resources for years. On Wednesday, Governor Hochul said she agrees with the comptroller’s assessment— that a decade of disinvestment in healthcare caused problems in the past.
"We are laser focused on fixing them," said Hochul. "Bring more transparency, so the public knows what’s going on in our nursing homes. That we have the data that’s available to us, is available to the public and also many other areas were making improvements."
When Hochul was asked if the state is prepared for another pandemic, Hochul said, "A lot of lessons were learned the hard way. We won’t make those mistakes."
The governor said she will continue to work closely with her health team.
The New York State Department of Health, releasing a statement saying in part, “We appreciate the Comptroller’s recommendations, including other actions to strengthen data tools and processes that are completed, underway, or being addressed by the Department. The lessons learned from the COVID pandemic continue to inform us, as we remain well-prepared for any new COVID outbreaks or future pandemics.”
According to the comptroller's office, more audits will be done in the future.