Local Long-Term Care Ombudsman staff and volunteers maintain a regular presence in the 8,650 long-term care facilities through out California. In 2017 these highly trained older adult advocates made 65,000 visits to facilities to ensure that they are accessible to residents, families and facility staff.
During these visits the Ombudsman representatives establish and build long standing relationships with partners that allow them to reach creative solutions to challenging issues and gain valuable insight into the daily activities of the facility.
Resources for the local programs have been stretched very thin, causing programs to prioritize “complaint investigation activities”. In 2017 more than half of the local Ombudsman programs entered a facility in response to a complaint rather than the hallmark activity of the program, the “Unannounced facility visit”.
