RCFE Rant-5

RCFE (Residential Care Facility for the Elderly) Part 5

You work for us (The State)!

They effectively come in, can take a quick walk through your house, and in a few minutes can tell you how to run your business, what you should do, how to do it, what’s wrong with how you do things and lots of other things they know nothing about.

Unfortunately, because they work for the State their word is essentially like God. To me they are like clerks with a big salary. You are forced to follow what they say, even though it may be totally wrong, inefficient, or ridiculous. This even goes for times when there is no inspection. If they tell you to do something, they always have a time limit and expect you to jump when they say jump.

In fact, just yesterday we got a call from Licensing. They very rarely call unless there is a problem. Right now we have a very unhappy responsible party (see the Mr. S story ) because we are putting their family member out of the facility. I suspect that has something to do with the call from Licensing. We were told to immediately fax a roster of our employees and the residents. It had to be faxed within the next few minutes. How is that for having tight control of your business? We complied.

It goes like this. They come in unannounced. They used to spend about 15 – 30 minutes, but now longer. They look around and search to find something wrong. There is always something because one cannot follow all their “rules”. Then they start writing you up for whatever they don’t like.

Unlike the previous LPAs (Licensing Program Analyst), the last two were both Axxhoxxx and essentially made up their own rules or bent them to fit their needs. The previous ones were very nice and if there was anything wrong they told you and let you fix it on the spot. The past two inspections with the bad LPAs took four hours for one and eight hours for the other. Imagine inspecting a house for 4 – 8 hours. There is no way they won’t find something out of place. [...]