Georgia

The grounds, as Georgia describes them

Rule 111-8-50-.11, "Transfer and Discharge" (Georgia Secretary of State, Rules and Regulations, none stated on page, retrieved 2026-09-14), treats the emergency case separately from every other case.

Subsection (1), the emergency case: "In an emergency situation where the resident or other residents are subject to an imminent and substantial danger that only immediate transfer or discharge will relieve, the facility may involuntarily transfer the resident to another health facility." The person in charge must document the reasons in the resident's file and "immediately inform the resident, guardian and other persons of the resident's choice regarding such transfer and the place where the resident is to be transferred."

Subsection (2): "In all other situations an involuntary transfer or discharge must be in accordance with any of the following reasons and procedures and only after all other reasonable alternatives to transfer have been exhausted:"

"(a) The resident's physician or, if unavailable, another physician determines that failure to transfer the resident will result in injury or illness to the resident or others. The resident's physician shall be kept informed of actions taken. The attending physician must document that determination in the resident's record. If the basis for the transfer or discharge is the threat of injury or illness to the resident only, the resident cannot be transferred or discharged unless the physician documents in the resident's medical record that such transfer or discharge is not expected to endanger the resident to a greater extent than remaining in the facility; or"

"(b) The facility does not participate in, or voluntarily or involuntarily ceases to operate or participate in the program which reimburses for the resident's care. In the event that a facility voluntarily or involuntarily ceases to operate or participate in the program which reimburses for the resident's care and proposes to transfer or discharge a resident because of that fact, the facility must cooperate fully with and take all reasonable directives from the State Medicaid Agency and the Health Care Financing Administration Regional Office in the implementation of any transfer planning and transfer counseling conducted by these agencies; or"

"(c) Nonpayment of allowable fees has occurred. When a resident has been converted from full or private pay status to Medicaid eligibility due to exhaustion of personal financial resources, nonpayment of allowable fees has not occurred so long as the facility participates in the Medicaid program. Similarly, conversion from Medicare/Medicaid eligibility status does not constitute nonpayment of allowable fees; or"

"(d) The findings of a Medicare or Medicaid medical necessity review determine that the resident no longer requires the level of care presently being provided, subject to the right of the resident to any appeal procedure available to challenge the determination of medical necessity review. Where space permits, the resident must be given the option of staying at the facility, if the facility is certified to provide the new level of care."

The published process

Requesting the hearing

Georgia publishes two steps, and a resident may reach the second without the first. Rule 111-8-50-.14, "Grievance Procedure": "Any resident, guardian or representative who believes his rights or, in the case of a guardian or representative, the rights of the resident, have been violated, may present a grievance." A grievance goes first to the facility administrator; if the complainant is not satisfied, subsection (c) sends it on: "he shall submit an oral or written complaint to the community or state ombudsman". Subsection (d): "If the ombudsman is unable to resolve the grievance to the complainant's satisfaction within 10 calendar days of submission to such ombudsman, the complainant may submit the grievance to an impartial referee, jointly chosen by the administrator or his designee and the complainant." Subsection (e) sets the outer limit on choosing that referee, quoting the rule's own text exactly, typographical error and all: "In the event that the complainant and the administrator/designee cannot agree upon an imparital referee within seven calendar days after the complainant has requested a referee's hearing, the complainant shall have the right to an administrative hearing pursuant to .15 of these rules and regulations." Subsection (i) preserves a direct route that skips the referee step entirely: "A resident, guardian or representative who elects not to proceed under this section shall not be prohibited from proceeding under .15 or .16 of these rules and regulations."

Rule 111-8-50-.15, "Administrative Hearing", opens by naming who may request one — again quoted exactly, including the rule's own repeated word: "Any resident, guardian or representative or administrator who is dissatisfied with the decision of the impartial referee or any resident, guardian or representative who is unable to agree upon an impartial referee, or who be believes that any of his rights under these rules and regulations have been violated, shall have the right to request a hearing from the Department pursuant to the Georgia Administrative Procedure Act O.C.G.A. § 50-13-1et seq. in conjunction with the statute, Long-term Care Facilities: Residents' Bill of Rights O.C.G.A. § 31-8-125." Subsection (b), the filing route: "A person desiring a hearing under this section may request such a hearing in writing to the Department. The request shall include the person's name, the name of the facility and the reason the hearing is requested. The request shall be mailed or delivered to the Department of Community Health." The rule itself states no address, email or form. The Department's own Healthcare Facility Regulation Division (HFRD) publishes, on its "HFRD Laws & Regulations" page: "To request a long-term care discharge appeal:" followed by the address ltc.discharge@dch.ga.gov — a separate line on the same page gives "hfrd.legal@dch.ga.gov" for "a hearing contesting an adverse action of the Department", which is not the resident's route. No postal address or form is published for the discharge-appeal route.

On pendency, subsection (d), quoted exactly, including the rule's own dropped letter: "Except in the event of an emergency situation in which the resident or other residents are subject to imminent and substantial danger that only immediate transfer will reduce, o except in case of nonpayment under subsection .11(2)(c), of these rules and regulations, no transfer shall take place until all appeal rights are exhausted. However, if a resident is transferred before exhaustion of all appeal rights, such resident in no way relinquishes any appeal rights under these rules and regulations."

The notice's required contents

Rule 111-8-50-.11(3): "The facility must give written notice to the resident, guardian or representative, if there is no guardian, and the resident's physician at least 30 days before any proposed transfer or discharge is made in accordance with subsections (2)(a), (2)(b), or (2)(c) of this rule. The written notice must contain the following information: the reasons for the proposed transfer or discharge; the effective date of the proposed transfer or discharge; the location or other facility to which the facility proposes to transfer or discharge the resident; and notice of the right to a hearing pursuant to the Georgia Administrative Procedure Act and Section .15 of these rules and regulations, and of the right to representation by legal counsel. If the resident so desires, the facility shall also send a copy of such notice to the community ombudsman, or state ombudsman if there is no community ombudsman." The rule does not state that the notice must carry the ombudsman's own contact details or a hearing-request form; only the docket's ombudsman row and the Division of Aging Services' own page state that contact, as published.

Subsection (6) sets a shorter, separate period for a move within the same building: "In the event that the facility proposes an involuntary transfer of the resident to another bed in the same facility, the resident and guardian shall receive 15 days written notice prior to such change."

Bed-hold and return

Two publishers answer different halves of this question, and neither restates the other. Rule 111-8-50-.11(9) states the right to come back: "Each resident transferred from a facility to a hospital, other health care facility, or trial alternative living placement shall have the right to return to the facility immediately upon discharge from the hospital, other health care facility or upon termination of the trial living placement, provided that the resident has continued to pay the facility or payment on behalf of the resident by another person or agency has been provided for the period of the resident's absence. If payment is provided for the period of absence, the facility shall continue the same room assignment for such resident. In cases of nonpayment to the facility during such absence, a resident who requests to return to a facility from a hospital shall be admitted to the facility to the first bed available, with priority over any existing waiting list."

The Department of Human Services' Division of Family and Children Services publishes the Medicaid payment side in its Medicaid Policy Manual, policy 2582, "Temporary Absence from Nursing Home" (effective February 2020): "DMA will continue to make a vendor payment for the actual number of days a bed is held for a recipient while hospitalized, up to a maximum of seven days per hospitalization." "Arrangements can be made between the NH and the recipient to hold the bed longer than seven days." A separate allowance runs for a home visit rather than a hospitalization: the manual's Chart 2582.1 states the vendor payment continues "a maximum number of 8 days per calendar year" for "A nursing home resident" on a home visit, against "up to 7 days" for a recipient "in the hospital". The manual restates the hospital figure under "Procedures": "Medicaid will pay the NH for up to 7 hospital bed hold days when an A/R goes into the hospital and is expected to return to the nursing home." It adds that "When a recipient remains in the hospital for more than 7 days, assume that the NH has made arrangements with the recipient or family to hold the bed beyond 7 days."

The three rows above hoist the questions a facility's counsel answers in the first fifteen minutes. They are quotations from Georgia's published sources, not a determination that any of them applies to any situation.

Notice periods and deadlines, as stated in the sources

All quoted; none calculated.

Thirty days' advance notice — Rule 111-8-50-.11(3), quoted above in full.

Fifteen days for a move within the same facility — subsection (6), quoted above in full.

Ten calendar days for the ombudsman's informal resolution attempt — Rule .14(d), quoted above in full: "If the ombudsman is unable to resolve the grievance to the complainant's satisfaction within 10 calendar days of submission to such ombudsman, the complainant may submit the grievance to an impartial referee".

Seven calendar days to agree on a referee — Rule .14(e), quoted above in full; past that point the right to an administrative hearing under .15 accrues directly.

Fourteen calendar days to the referee's hearing — Rule .14(e): "Within 14 calendar days after the complainant has requested a hearing before an impartial referee, such hearing shall be held".

Seventy-two hours for the referee's decision — Rule .14(f): "Within 72 hours after the hearing before the referee, the referee shall render a written decision".

Forty-five calendar days to the administrative hearing — Rule .15(c): "The hearing shall be conducted within 45 calendar days of the receipt by the Department of the request for the hearing."

Thirty calendar days for the hearing officer's decision — Rule .15(f): "The decision of the hearing officer shall be made within 30 calendar days from the date of the hearing".

Seven hospital bed-hold days, and eight home-visit days per calendar year — Medicaid Policy Manual, policy 2582, quoted above in full.

What any of these periods means for a particular case is for the hearing office to determine.

Source map

Captured: all four, in tools/packets/georgia-packet.txt. Pending: any published hearing-request form or postal address for the discharge-appeal route (the Department publishes only the email address quoted above) — per the packet's pending list.

Change log

2026-09-14 — Deepened to a full page. Newly captured: the Department of Community Health's HFRD Laws & Regulations page (source 3), naming the long-term care discharge-appeal email address the 2026-08-30 baseline could not find, and the Department of Human Services' Medicaid Policy Manual policy 2582 (source 4), the state's Medicaid bed-hold payment statement. Both were added to tools/recipes/georgia.json as new sources (recipe digest 45c47b529b1d); the two standing sources were recaptured unchanged in the same pass and the packet was promoted as a rebuild. Section 01 (the grounds) and section 02 (the published process, including the notice's required contents in full, bed-hold and return, and the notice-periods register) are now written.

Findings, continuing the numbering from 2026-08-30: (8) The HFRD page sets its three request addresses as Cloudflare-obfuscated mailto links; a raw fetch without decoding them reads "[email protected]" for all three, which is not a Department omission, only an undecoded capture — capture.py's extractor decodes them before the scope walk, per CLAUDE.md's rule that this obfuscation is not a capture limit. (9) Rule .11(9) and the Medicaid manual's policy 2582 answer different questions and are shown together rather than reconciled: the rule states a resident's right to return to the facility conditioned on continued payment during the absence, with a "first bed available" priority over any waiting list on nonpayment; the manual states how many days Medicaid itself will keep paying the facility to hold the bed (seven for a hospitalization, eight per calendar year for a home visit) and that the facility and resident or family "can" arrange to hold it longer at their own cost. Neither publisher states what a facility's own bed-hold policy must say, and none was found. (10) Georgia's appeal route runs through two publishers layered inside one rule chapter: an informal grievance and referee step (Rule .14) that a resident may skip entirely (subsection (i)) in favor of the administrative hearing (Rule .15) the docket's "Hearing office" row already named. (11) The rule requires the facility's notice to state "the right to a hearing" and "the right to representation by legal counsel" but does not require the notice itself to carry the ombudsman's contact details or a hearing-request form; both remain absences as far as Rule .11(3) itself goes. Capture pending: per the source map. Internet Archive: not yet submitted for the new sources. Reviewer: Carrie Schluter, reviewed 2026-09-15. Corrections: hello@fieldassembly.net.

2026-08-30 — Baseline page built from the first Georgia packet: docket, lede, source map, change log. Not yet captured or written: section 01 (the grounds, as Georgia describes them) and section 02 (the published process, including the notice's required contents in full, bed-hold and return, and the notice-periods register). Findings: (1) The nursing home rules, Chapter 111-8-56, were captured and searched and carry no transfer or discharge provision; the operative rules for a resident facing a move sit in the residents' bill of rights chapter, 111-8-50, which covers long-term care facilities generally. The nursing home chapter is therefore not in this packet. (2) Georgia's grounds are not the federal six: they run on a physician's injury-or-illness determination, the facility's exit from the reimbursement programme, nonpayment of allowable fees, and a medical necessity review — with the emergency case handled separately in subsection (1). Both lists stand as published, and the federal enumeration stays on the federal page. (3) The rule states the appeal is requested "in writing to the Department" and "mailed or delivered to the Department of Community Health" but publishes no address, email or form, and none was captured elsewhere; the absence is stated rather than filled. (4) Georgia states an intrafacility notice period of fifteen days, distinct from the thirty-day period for a move out of the facility. (5) The rules also carry an informal step before an "impartial referee", held at the facility within fourteen calendar days of the request, with an administrative hearing available afterwards; that machinery is captured and will be quoted in section 02 when that section is written. (6) The Secretary of State's rules site returns HTTP 403 to curl, and the Department of Community Health's own PDF of the chapter does the same; Source 1 came through the session's fetch tool, which renders the rule tables as markdown, so the capture's row-and-pipe formatting is the tool's rendering of the publisher's tables. (7) No first-party statement of a Georgia Medicaid bed-hold period was captured. Capture pending: per the source map. Internet Archive: not yet submitted. Reviewer: Carrie Schluter, reviewed 2026-08-30. Corrections: hello@fieldassembly.net.