Nursing home survey results are publicly available through both federal and state databases, and the fastest way to access them is through Medicare’s Care Compare tool at Medicare.gov. Every Medicare-certified nursing home in the country is inspected at least once a year, and the findings from those inspections, including any violations and their severity, are posted online for anyone to review. Here’s how to find and make sense of them.
Using Medicare’s Care Compare Tool
The primary federal database for nursing home inspection results is the Care Compare tool on Medicare.gov. To use it, go to the site, select “Nursing homes” as the provider type, and enter a location (street address, ZIP code, city, or state). You can also search by the facility’s name directly if you already know which nursing home you’re looking into.
The results page for each facility shows a star rating system (one to five stars), with separate ratings for health inspections, staffing levels, and quality measures. The health inspections section is where you’ll find the actual survey results. Click into a specific facility’s profile and you can view the deficiencies cited during recent inspections, when the inspection took place, and how serious each violation was. This is the single most useful starting point for comparing nursing homes side by side.
Checking Your State Health Department
State health department websites often provide more granular detail than the federal tool. State survey agencies are the ones actually conducting the inspections on behalf of CMS (the federal agency that oversees Medicare), and many states maintain their own searchable databases with additional context.
Colorado’s Department of Public Health and Environment, for example, lets you search inspection results going back three years for any licensed healthcare facility. Their database includes the specific citations from each inspection, the full text of the regulation that was violated, and the facility’s plan of correction explaining how it addressed the problem. Many states also include “occurrence reports,” which are incidents that nursing homes self-report, like falls or medication errors. These won’t always appear on the federal site.
To find your state’s database, search for your state’s department of health plus “nursing home inspections” or “facility search.” The naming varies. Some states call it a “facility finder,” others a “provider lookup.” The data is free and public in every case.
What You’re Actually Looking At
The core document behind every nursing home inspection is called the Statement of Deficiencies and Plan of Correction. This is the official form (CMS-2567) that surveyors fill out when they find a facility isn’t meeting federal requirements. It has two main parts you should pay attention to.
The first is the Summary Statement of Deficiencies, which describes each specific problem the surveyors identified. These are based on the surveyors’ professional judgment and tied to specific Medicare, Medicaid, or safety code requirements. Each deficiency is tagged with a reference number pointing to the exact regulation that was violated.
The second part is the Plan of Correction, where the nursing home explains what it’s doing to fix the problem and provides an explicit date for when the correction will be completed. If the fix was already in place by the time the form was returned, the facility notes that too. Reading both sections together gives you a sense of not just what went wrong, but whether the facility responded quickly and seriously.
How Violations Are Rated by Severity
Not all deficiencies carry the same weight. CMS uses a scope and severity grid that assigns each violation a letter from A through L, based on two factors: how serious the harm was (or could have been) and how many residents were affected.
At the low end, A through C violations involve no actual harm and only minimal potential for harm. These are essentially minor issues, whether they affected one resident or the entire facility. They carry zero points in CMS’s scoring system.
D through F violations still involve no actual harm, but the potential for harm goes beyond minimal. These are more concerning. An isolated instance (D) scores 2 points, a pattern across multiple residents (E) scores 4, and a widespread problem (F) scores 6.
G through I mean actual harm occurred, but it wasn’t immediately life-threatening. A single instance (G) scores 10 points, a pattern (H) scores 20, and widespread harm (I) scores 30. These are serious red flags.
J through L are the most severe: immediate jeopardy to a resident’s health or safety. An isolated case (J) scores 50 points, a pattern (K) scores 100, and a widespread immediate jeopardy finding (L) scores 150. Certain violations in the G-through-L range can also be classified as “substandard quality of care” if they involve resident behavior practices, quality of life, or quality of care regulations, which adds even more points to the facility’s score.
When you’re reviewing a facility’s inspection history, a handful of D-level citations is a very different picture from even one J or K. Focus on the letter codes, not just the total number of deficiencies.
How Often Inspections Happen
State survey agencies inspect nursing homes once a year as a baseline. Facilities with poor track records, unresolved complaints, or incidents reported by the facility itself may be inspected more frequently. Complaint-driven inspections can happen at any time and are not announced in advance. The results from both routine and complaint surveys appear in the same databases, so you may see multiple inspections within a single year for a facility that’s been flagged for problems.
Getting Help Interpreting Results
If the inspection reports feel dense or confusing, your state’s Long-Term Care Ombudsman program can help. Ombudsmen are advocates for nursing home residents, and part of their role is providing the public with information about facilities, residents’ rights, and care quality. They can help you understand what a specific deficiency means in practical terms, put a facility’s history in context, and point you toward additional resources. You can find your local ombudsman through the National Long-Term Care Ombudsman Resource Center at ltcombudsman.org.