Maine nursing home responsiveness requirements

The facility must keep all staff knowledgeable of the Adult Protective Services Act and ensure every alleged instance of mistreatment, neglect or abuse, including injuries of unknown source and misappropriation of resident property, is reported immediately to the administrator and to other officials as State law requires; the underlying State-law clock in 22 M.R.S. § 3477 is an immediate telephone report to DHHS.

...are reported immediately, through established procedures, to the administrator of the facility and to other officials in accordance with State law.

A nursing facility must provide or arrange physician services 24 hours a day for emergencies, and the admitting physician must ensure another physician supervises a resident's medical care when the attending physician is unavailable (§ 16.A.4).

The facility must provide or arrange for the provision of physician services twenty-four (24) hours a day, in case of an emergency.

Every facility must have a full-time RN Director of Nursing, an RN on duty at least eight consecutive hours every day, a licensed nurse on duty on each of the day, evening and night shifts seven days a week (with additional nurses scaled by bed count), and an RN on duty or on call at all times regardless of facility size.

All licensed nursing facilities, regardless of size, shall have a Registered Professional Nurse on duty or on call at all times.

Residents have a right to regular access to the private use of a telephone with amplification for the hearing impaired, and the physical plant rules separately require a telephone accessible to and usable by every resident with privacy afforded, plus a facility telephone (not a pay station or locked phone) able to summon help promptly in an emergency.

The resident has the right to have regular access to the private use of a telephone. Amplification shall be provided for the hearing impaired.

Every facility must write a disaster and emergency preparedness plan with three components (in-facility disaster, community-wide disaster, and other emergencies such as severe weather or missing residents), file a copy and every revision with the Department, orient staff on hire and annually, post evacuation plans on each floor, and drill twelve times a year; § 20.B.5.a separately requires continuing emergency power to keep the telephone system and call systems operating during an outage.

All facilities shall develop a written disaster plan and procedures to meet the needs of the facility. The disaster plan shall be written to identify emergencies and disasters most likely to occur.

An automatic call system must be provided at each bed and in every resident toilet, bathing, shower, beauty parlor and common resident area; on any floor without staff on duty at all times the calls must annunciate at the nearest nurses station identifying the calling location, and facilities planned after July 1, 1994 must also have intercoms connecting resident areas to the nurses station.

There shall be an automatic call system provided at each bed, as well as in each resident toilet room, bathing room, shower room, beauty parlor and common resident areas.

Every nursing facility must maintain a quality assurance committee (Director of Nursing, Medical Director, a pharmacist and at least three other staff) that reports to the administrator or governing body, meets at least quarterly, monitors and documents quality and deficiencies, and develops corrective plans of action, covering infection control, accident prevention, pharmaceutical services and utilization review.

All nursing facilities must maintain a quality assurance committee, which may act as a committee of the whole, and which reports to the administrator or the Governing Body.