Excerpted from a McKnights Senior Living Blog by Kimberly Bonvissuto
A national background check program was so successful in helping states develop or enhance systems for conducting background checks of prospective long-term care employees that more than a quarter million prospective employees were disqualified from working in the sector, even after funding for the program ran out, according to a final report on the program.
The US Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General released a final analysis on November 7 of the National Background Check Program for long-term care providers. The agency reported that 29 states participated in the program between 2010 and 2024 and that the program helped 27 of them develop programs to identify efficient, effective and economical procedures for conducting background checks on prospective long-term care employees.
During the National Background Check Program, states disqualified at least 106,000 individuals with criminal convictions from employment. Disqualifying criminal convictions included offenses of murder, assault, battery, robbery, theft, fraud and forgery.
Enacted by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in 2010, the National Background Check Program provided grants to states to develop systems to conduct background checks of state and federal criminal history records for prospective long-term care employees for facilities or operators in the following settings:
- Assisted living communities
- Providers of personal care services
- Residential care providers
- Skilled nursing facilities
- Nursing facilities
- Adult day care providers
- Home health agencies
- Hospice providers
- Long-term care hospitals
- Intermediate care facilities for individuals with intellectual disabilities
- Other long-term care providers, including providers of home- and community-based waiver programs
States were eligible to receive up to $3 million in federal funding for three years to develop and design background check systems. The act required states to provide matching funds and to include several types of background checks in their programs, including enabling a search of state databases and abuse registries, state criminal history records, a fingerprint-based search of FBI criminal history reports, records from any relevant criminal proceedings and continued monitoring of status changes to previous background checks.
Even after funding for the program ended, 17 states continued to use the systems built during the program, disqualifying an additional 254,000 potential long-term care employees from employment.
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