A new study in The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety entitled "Safety Culture - Relationship Between Nursing Home Safety Culture and Joint Commission Accreditation" suggests that nursing homes accredited by The Joint Commission have a more robust culture of resident safety than non-accredited facilities and has a beneficial impact on resident safety issues such as staffing, teamwork, training, non-punitive responses to mistakes, and communication openness.
What is interesting is the emphasis on safety "culture." In other words, if the culture supports it, actions to make facilities safer follow and therefore the facilities are indeed safer. But it starts with a culture of commitment around the issue and evidently accreditation helps facilitate that.
The report states that safety culture interventions in hospitals have been found to be associated with improved safety practices and outcomes but that nursing homes generally report a poorly developed safety culture.
Accreditation provides a structure for organizing care processes and is known to stimulate continuous quality improvement and thereby has the potential to stimulate improvements in organizational safety culture.
A random sample of 6,000 nursing homes was selected from all 50 states. The Nursing Home Survey on Resident Safety Culture was sent to these facilities, and nursing home administrators and directors of nursing were instructed to complete the survey.
The response rate for the sample was 67%.
Joint Commission accreditation appeared to be associated with a more favorable resident safety culture in nursing homes. Assessing a nursing home's safety culture is an organization's first step toward improving the culture of safety.
Researchers believe that these findings support the need for further discussion and facilitation of voluntary accreditation in nursing homes. Other Joint Commission research has shown that accreditation leads to reductions in deficiency citations and in improved quality of care outcomes in nursing home settings.
Very few nursing homes in the United States seek accreditation beyond what is required to receive payment under the Medicare and Medicaid programs. Fewer than 15% of nursing homes are accredited by The Joint Commission or other independent accreditation organizations.
The fees associated with a three-year accreditation are high and nursing homes already spend a considerable amount of time and resources to comply with federal requirements under the annual state survey process.
I did not see a breakdown in terms of for-profit or not-for-profit respondents nor a breakdown of the 15% of accredited nursing homes in terms of profit status but I would be curious to see the breakdown and whether there are any correlations.
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@Joint Commission
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