Two bills focusing on nursing homes are drawing the ire of Iowa’s largest senior citizens group. The A-A-R-P is asking lawmakers to vote down a bill that would allow nursing homes to keep internal investigations and quality checks secret from the public. Betty Fitkin is a resident advocate at a Cedar Falls nursing home. She says the move would hide bad care. Fitkin says it wouldn’t help them protect the rights of nursing home residents.Iowa Trial Lawyers Association V-P Bruce Braley of Waterloo says his group’s staunchly opposed to the idea, too. He says it’s a secrecy bill, not a patient safety bill.Another bill that’s drawing fire would bar the state from posting the names of nursing homes that’re under investigation for abuses on its nursing home watch-dog website. The bill says nursing homes could only be listed after the home’s exhausted all its appeals of citations, fines or criminal convictions.
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