Kentucky Bill Would Require Fingerprinting and Background Checks for Nursing Home Workers

The state of Kentucky is taking steps to ensure that all of their elderly residents who live in long term care facilities will be safer by attempting to pass a bill that would require all employees to undergo fingerprint based full criminal background checks. This would constitute a huge improvement over how screening has been done in the past.

Currently, in Kentucky, a person who is employed by a long term care facility must go through a background check that only searches state records. There is no search of national records, nor are the background checks specifically deep or detailed. The newly proposed background checks in the bill will search national databases for any criminal abuse convictions via a combination of name and finger prints. The new system would also use continuous monitoring of employee names which would alert the state and facilities if one of their employees was involved in any crime. The state of Kentucky currently has about 24,000 employees working in long term care facilities and all of them would be subject to these new background checks if this bill is passed.

The cost of the background checks would be taken care of by a grant that the state was given by the Federal government. Along with a state grant, it is thought that the state would be able to pay for these background checks until 2014. At that point, the state facilities would have to pay for the background checks themselves or pass the fee along to applicants and employees. The bill has been passed by the Kentucky state Senate and has been moved on to the state House.

The importance of these types of background checks is evident when you consider the incidence of elder abuse in the country. Third party companies like backgroundchecks.com have long advocated adding nationwide instant searches to complement more traditional single jurisdiction searches in order to cost effectively increase the search coverage and not purposely leave out jurisdictions across the US that are available

They have a wide variety of products to compliment initial screening packages, including a product like Ongoing Criminal Monitoring. Similarly to the program proposed by the Kentucky bill, this system continuously monitors the name and date of birth of all employees. Companies and organizations would be notified when any additional or new criminal records  associated with an employee appeared in the system.

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backgroundchecks.com - a founding member of the National Association of Professional Background Screeners (NAPBS®) - serves thousands of customers nationwide, from small businesses to Fortune 100 companies by providing comprehensive screening services.  Headquartered in Dallas, Texas, with an Eastern Operations Center in Chapin, S.C., backgroundchecks.com is home to one of the largest online criminal conviction databases in the industry. For more information about backgroundchecks’ offerings, please visit www.backgroundchecks.com.

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Source: http://www.kentucky.com/2012/03/01/2090890/bill-would-require-finger-print.html