The nursing home is located in Culver City. For purposes of this response, I am using a service area of 30 miles because Culver City itself covers an area of 5.1 square miles, and a service area of 30 miles encompasses surrounding neighborhoods within easy reach of the home. The nursing home provides skilled nursing services predominantly to an elderly population. In our service area, which encompasses the following zip codes: 90230, 90231, 90232 and 90233, the elderly population is 5,395, which constitutes 13.9 percent of the population (Culver, 2005). In the last 10 years, the elderly population has grown, and the need for nursing home beds is anticipated to grow with the increased elderly population. There is one other nursing home which service these communities (Seniors-site.com, 2005). They are always full. The number of nursing homes has not grown to meet the growth in anticipated need. Hospital beds in the area are also always full, which is likely indicative of a patient presence unable to be discharged because of a lack of nursing home beds in the area.
The number of nursing homes and nursing home beds in California has not risen in the last decade, in fact it has fallen slightly, and the occupancy rate of beds in nursing homes was 81.6 percent in 2002 (California, 2002). In 2002, 226 out of every 1,000 California residents lived in a nursing home. With the aging baby boomer generation, these rates are going to rise steeply over the next few years (California's, 2003).
Rising medical care costs and decreasing reimbursements from Medicare and Medi-Cal are putting nursing homes in a financial vice (California's, 2030). Roughly 75 percent of revenues for skilled nursing facilities come from the government, but the budget deficit in California has led to drastic cuts in Medi-Cal reimbursements and the federal deficit has led to cuts in Medicare reimbursements, leaving the nursing home industry in dire straits...