New Jersey

The grounds, as New Jersey describes them

The resident-rights page (NJ Long-Term Care Ombudsman, Last Updated: Thursday, 05/15/25, retrieved 2026-09-06), under "Discharges and Transfers", states the right:

"To be transferred or discharged only for one or more of the following reasons:"

"In an emergency, with notification of your physician and your next of kin or guardian or if the facility closes."

"For medical reasons, to protect your welfare or the welfare of others or to comply with your advance directive."

"For nonpayment of fees, in situations not prohibited by law."

"Your health has improved and you no longer require nursing home care."

The same page states, in the same section: "Transfers to another facility cannot be solely for the convenience of the facility – and LTCO must be notified."

The office's facilities guidance, "Notice Requirements for Transfer/Discharge of a Long-Term Care Resident" (NJ Office of the Long-Term Care Ombudsman, PDF, retrieved 2026-09-06), states the allowable-reason rule in fuller, numbered form: "The facility must permit each resident to remain in the facility, and not transfer or discharge the resident from the facility unless:"

"1. The transfer or discharge is necessary for the resident's welfare and the resident's needs cannot be met in the facility pursuant to 42 C.F.R. § 483.15 (a)(6);"

"2. The transfer or discharge is appropriate because the resident's health has improved sufficiently so the resident no longer needs the services provided by the facility;"

"3. The safety of individuals in the facility is endangered due to the clinical or behavioral status of the resident;"

"4. The health of individuals in the facility would otherwise be endangered;"

"5. The resident has failed, after reasonable and appropriate notice, to pay for (or to have paid under Medicare or Medicaid) a stay at the facility. Non-payment applies if the resident does not submit the necessary paperwork for third party payment or after the third party, including Medicare or Medicaid, denies the claim and the resident refuses to pay for his or her stay."

"6. The facility closes."

Immediately after the list, the guidance states the pendency rule and a documentation duty, quoted in full under Requesting the hearing in section 02, and then: "All transfer and discharge notices must specifically cite one of the six above reasons. Other justifications, such as behavioral problems or failure to follow facility policies, are not reasons under federal law." It also states a duty that runs alongside any transfer or discharge, whatever the ground: "the facility must ensure that the transfer or discharge is documented in the resident's medical record and appropriate information is communicated to the receiving health care institution or provider."

The resident-rights page's four-item list and the guidance's six-item list are not worded alike; both stand as published, reconciled nowhere — see finding (8) in the change log. The guidance's own citations (42 C.F.R. § 483.15) are the state office's citations for what it tells New Jersey facilities to do; the federal enumeration itself is quoted separately on the federal page and is not restated here.

The published process

Requesting the hearing

The facilities guidance states the pendency rule immediately under the allowable-reason list: "A facility may not transfer or discharge a resident while an appeal is pending, when a resident exercises his or her right to appeal a transfer or discharge notice from the facility, unless the failure to discharge or transfer would endanger the health or safety of the resident or other individuals in the facility. The facility must also be sure to document the danger that failure to transfer or discharge would pose." It states the appeal route: "Residents, regardless of payor source, have the right under federal law to appeal transfer/discharge notices to the State Medicaid agency. You must include contact information for the Fair Hearing Unit of the State Medicaid agency for this purpose." — publishing the address as "Division of Medical Assistance and Health Services" "Fair Hearing Unit" "P.O. Box 712" "Trenton, NJ 08625" "(609) 588-2655". No filing deadline, filing form, or online portal is stated in the sources reviewed — searched: both captured sources in full. The guidance separately states what the ombudsman office's own role is not: "Notices should never list the LTCO as an appeals agency. The LTCO has no involvement in facility decisions to involuntarily remove residents, nor does the LTCO have a process for resident appeals." This contact and this pendency statement are the ombudsman office's own publication of the Division of Medical Assistance and Health Services' process; the Division's own first-party statement of its fair-hearing procedure and filing deadline was not reached — searched: the Division's public web pages under nj.gov/humanservices/dmahs, which state no transfer-or-discharge fair-hearing procedure page at the addresses tried.

The notice's required contents

The facilities guidance states, in a closing "Summary of Notice Requirements": "the notice requirements for transfer/discharge of a resident from a nursing facility must contain:" "The reason for transfer or discharge;" "The effective date;" "The location to which the resident is transferred or discharged;" "A statement of the resident's appeal rights, including contact information for the appeal agency, information on how to obtain an appeal form and assistance in completing the form and submitting the appeal hearing request;" and "Contact information for the NJ LTCO or Disability Rights NJ and appeals information for the Division of Medical Assistance and Health Services Fair Hearing Unit."

The body of the guidance states each item at greater length. On destination: "The notice must identify the location to which the resident will be transferred or discharged. This too, must be specific. Vague language such as “to other facility” or “home” is not sufficient." On the ombudsman contact the notice must carry: "The notice must include the name, telephone number and address of the LTCO." — published as "Office of the Long-Term Care Ombudsman" "P.O. Box 852" "Trenton, NJ 08625-0852" "(877) 582-6995" "Fax: (609) 943-3479" "mandatoryreports@LTCO.nj.gov". Where a resident has a disability, an added contact is required: "If the resident has an intellectual or developmental disability or a mental illness, the notice must also include the mailing and email address and telephone number of the agency responsible for protection and advocacy under federal law." — named as "Disability Rights New Jersey" at "210 South Broad Street, 3rd Floor" "Trenton, New Jersey 08608" "(609) 292-9742 or (800) 922-7233 in NJ Only" "(609) 777-0187 (Fax)" "(609) 633-7106 (TTY)" "advocate@drnj.org". On delivery: "The notice of the transfer/discharge must be given to the resident or the resident's representative(s). The notice must contain the reasons for the move in writing and in a language and manner they understand." and "a copy of the notice must be sent to the LTCO when the transfer/discharge is initiated by the facility." The guidance states plainly that giving the notice only to family is not enough: "This is not legally sufficient and, more importantly, does not alert the very person whose rights are impacted by the proposed transfer or discharge." On a later change: "If the information in the notice changes prior to effecting the transfer or discharge, the facility must update the recipients of the notice as soon as practicable once the updated information becomes available."

Bed-hold and return

The resident-rights page states the right "To be informed of the facility's bed-hold policy when you are transferred to an acute care or psychiatric hospital." No period is stated for that policy, and no other first-party statement of a bed-hold day count was found in the sources reviewed — searched: both captured sources in full. Not stated in the sources reviewed. Separately, for a resident receiving Medicaid, the facilities guidance states a permission step that precedes any relocation rather than a bed-hold period: "If the resident is receiving Medicaid, you must first contact your local Office of Community Choice Options (OCCO) for permission to relocate him or her. The New Jersey Department of Health's regulations outlining that procedure can be found at N.J.A.C. 8:85-1.10. If OCCO grants its permission to transfer the resident, only then can you issue a 30-day notice to relocate the resident to another appropriate placement." N.J.A.C. 8:85-1.10 itself was not reached: New Jersey's Administrative Code is published through a LexisNexis Advance portal (linked from the Department of Health's own rules page) that returned a login-gated page to the transports available for this pass, rather than the rule text — see finding (9).

The three rows above hoist the questions a facility's counsel answers in the first fifteen minutes. They are quotations from New Jersey'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.

30 days' advance notice — the resident-rights page: "at least 30 days in advance when the nursing home requests your transfer or discharge, except in an emergency"; the facilities guidance: "must be issued at least 30 days prior to that date", referring to the effective date in the notice.

60 days for a closure — the facilities guidance: "When the facility is closing, the notice must be issued at least 60 days prior to the proposed transfer/discharge date."

30 days for a Medicaid relocation after OCCO permission — the facilities guidance: "only then can you issue a 30-day notice to relocate the resident to another appropriate placement."

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

Source map

Captured: both, in tools/packets/new-jersey-packet.txt. Pending: a first-party DMAHS statement of the fair-hearing route and filing deadline, the Department of Health's licensing rules at N.J.A.C. 8:39, N.J.A.C. 8:85-1.10 (login-gated on the LexisNexis Advance portal the Department's own rules page links to), and any statement of a Medicaid bed-hold period.

Change log

2026-09-06 — Deepened to a full page. No new source was captured: the existing recipe (tools/recipes/new-jersey.json, digest unchanged at 191d87d35358) was re-run to confirm currency before this pass wrote sections 01 and 02, produced a byte-identical capture on a second run, and was retained as confirmed (history 2026-09-06, hash 92ff782a4eb6c4e2); the only differences from the prior capture were site-navigation and script boilerplate dropping out of source 2 (a translation-services disclaimer paragraph, several menu items, an embedded video caption, and Internet Explorer conditional-comment script tags), consistent with the comment/hidden-node extraction fix landed portfolio-wide 2026-09-04 rather than any change to the resident-rights page's substance. Sections 01 and 02 and the notice-periods register are now written from the full text of both sources, most of which the 2026-08-30 baseline pass had not yet read past the passages already quoted in the docket. A bounded, unsuccessful attempt was made to reach the Department of Health's own regulation, N.J.A.C. 8:39 and N.J.A.C. 8:85-1.10: the Department's own rules page (nj.gov/health/legal/rules/) states that "the official versions of rules ... are published in the New Jersey Administrative Code ... available ... at a free website maintained by Lexis/Nexis" but links to advance.lexis.com, a session-gated product rather than a free public viewer; a search for a Department of Health-hosted PDF mirror and for a Division of Medical Assistance and Health Services fair-hearing procedure page found neither. Findings, continuing the numbering from 2026-08-30: (8) The resident-rights page's four-item grounds list and the facilities guidance's six-item list use different wording and different groupings for what appear to be overlapping bases; both stand as published, reconciled nowhere. (9) N.J.A.C. 8:39 (the Department of Health's licensing standards for long-term care facilities) and N.J.A.C. 8:85-1.10 (the OCCO relocation-permission procedure the facilities guidance cites) remain uncaptured because New Jersey's official Administrative Code is published only through a login-gated LexisNexis Advance portal; no free mirror was found. (10) The facilities guidance's pendency statement and its documentation duty are themselves cited by the guidance to 42 C.F.R. § 483.15(c)(1)-(2) — the state office's own citation, in the same manner the six-item grounds list already cites 42 C.F.R. § 483.15 — and are carried here as this office's own published guidance to New Jersey facilities, consistent with how the 2026-08-30 baseline already treated that list. Capture pending: per the source map. Internet Archive: not yet submitted. Reviewer: Carrie Schluter, reviewed 2026-09-06. Corrections: hello@fieldassembly.net.

2026-08-30 — Baseline page built from the first New Jersey packet: docket, lede, source map, change log. Not yet captured or written: section 01 (the grounds, as New Jersey 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) Both captured sources come from the same publisher, the Office of the Long-Term Care Ombudsman; the docket says so, and the hearing row states that the Fair Hearing Unit's contact is that office's publication of it rather than the Division's own. (2) The Division of Medical Assistance and Health Services' Medicaid hearings page returned HTTP 404 at the path tried, and no other DMAHS statement of the transfer and discharge appeal route was captured; the absence is stated rather than filled. (3) No filing deadline for a transfer or discharge fair hearing is stated in either captured source. (4) The two sources state the grounds differently: the resident-rights page gives a four-item list in the office's own words, and the facilities guidance gives a six-item list keyed to 42 C.F.R. § 483.15. Both stand as published, reconciled nowhere, and the federal enumeration stays on the federal page. (5) The facilities guidance states an instruction to facilities that bears directly on what a resident's notice should look like: "Notices should never list the LTCO as an appeals agency." (6) Neither source states a New Jersey bed-hold period; the resident-rights page refers only to being informed of the facility's own bed-hold policy on transfer to a hospital, and no period is supplied from any other source. (7) The facilities guidance states no date of its own. Capture pending: per the source map. Internet Archive: not yet submitted. Reviewer: Carrie Schluter, reviewed 2026-08-30. Corrections: hello@fieldassembly.net.