South Dakota

The grounds, as South Dakota describes them

ARSD 44:73:11:14(1) states the grounds in a single sentence, as part of the admission, transfer, and discharge policies and procedures a facility must establish and follow (South Dakota Legislature, § 44:73:11:14 last amended by 51 SDR 53, effective November 11, 2024, retrieved 2026-09-25): "The resident may remain in the facility and may not be transferred or discharged unless" —

"the resident's needs and welfare cannot be met by the facility,"

"the resident's health has improved sufficiently so the resident no longer needs the services provided by the facility,"

"the safety or health of individuals in the facility is endangered by the resident,"

"the resident has failed to pay for allowable billed services as agreed to,"

"or the facility ceases to operate".

All five bases sit in this one sentence, in this order, in the rule's own text; the rule does not itself letter or number them, and none is added here.

The published process

Requesting the hearing

ARSD 44:73:11:14(4) requires a facility's admission, transfer, and discharge policy to include "A description of how the resident may appeal a decision by the facility to transfer or discharge the resident." The rule does not itself name an office, a form, a filing route, or a deadline for that appeal, and no other first-party document located ties a nursing facility's own transfer-or-discharge decision to a specific hearing route by name.

Separately, the Department of Social Services publishes a general fair-hearing process for its own actions. ARSD 67:17:02:03: "To appeal a Department of Social Services action or inaction regarding the supplemental nutrition assistance program or medical assistance program, an individual, or the individual's representative, shall submit a written or oral request for an appeal to the department's Office of Administrative Hearings. For all other department programs, to appeal a department action or inaction, an individual, or the individual's representative, shall submit a written and signed request for a hearing to the Office of Administrative Hearings." The department's own Fair Hearings page gives the filing address as "Department of Social Services" "Office of Administrative Hearings" "700 Governors Drive" "Pierre, SD 57501", phone 605.773.6851, admhrngs@state.sd.us, and states "The deadline to request a fair hearing is stated on the Department's notice of the adverse action." The same page states that once a hearing is requested, "In most cases, the ALJ must issue a final decision within 90 days (60 days in food stamp cases) after your hearing request." ARSD 67:17:02:04 lists twelve numbered filing-period categories, none of which by its own terms names a nursing facility's transfer-or-discharge decision; the nearest general catch-all reads "Thirty days after notice of the action complained of or the conference decision, or thirty days after action should have been taken by the department as provided by law or rule" (ARSD 67:17:02:04(7)).

No first-party source reviewed states that this Office of Administrative Hearings route is the appeal a resident uses for a facility's own transfer-or-discharge decision under 44:73:11:14, and none states a pendency provision for that decision — whether a timely-filed appeal keeps the resident in place while it is heard. Both are recorded here as absences, searched in ARSD chapter 44:73:11 in full, ARSD chapter 67:17:02 in full, and the Department of Social Services' own Fair Hearings page.

The notice's required contents

ARSD 44:73:11:14(2): "The facility must notify the resident or the resident's legal representative and state ombudsman in writing at least thirty days before the transfer or discharge unless a change in the resident's health requires immediate transfer or discharge or the resident has not resided in the facility for thirty days. The written notice must specify the reason for, and effective date of, the transfer or discharge and the location to which the resident will be transferred or discharged". The rule names the state ombudsman as a required notice recipient alongside the resident, but does not itself require that the notice given to the resident state the ombudsman's own address or telephone number, and it does not require the notice to state an appeal route, a hearing office, or an appeal deadline. No other first-party source reviewed adds to this list.

Bed-hold and return

ARSD 44:73:11:03(3) requires a facility to give each resident, in writing, "A description of the bed-hold policy that indicates the length of time the bed will be held for the resident, any policies regarding the held bed, and readmission rights of the resident" — the rule requires the facility to state its own bed-hold policy rather than itself setting a bed-hold period.

South Dakota Medicaid's own Billing and Policy Manual for skilled nursing and nursing facilities states specific limits for a Medicaid-covered absence. On hospitalization: "Reserve bed days are days that the recipient is absent from the nursing facility due to an inpatient hospital stay. Reserve bed days must be ordered by a physician. South Dakota Medicaid covers a maximum of 5 consecutive reserve bed days for a recipient. Additional reserve bed days are only covered if the recipient returns to the nursing facility for 24 hours or more. This provision also applies when the Medicaid recipient leaves the facility for a stay at the South Dakota Human Services Center." On non-medical absence: "Non-medical leave days are leave days from the nursing facility for non-medical reasons (e.g., visits to the homes of family or friends). The attending physician or other licensed practitioner must approve the leave and certify that the leave is not contrary to the patient's plan of care. Non-medical leave days are reimbursable and must be included on the claim as therapeutic leave days. The recipient may be absent from the nursing facility for a maximum of fifteen consecutive days. Before any more therapeutic leave days may be taken, the recipient must return to the facility for 24 hours." On return after that limit: "After more than 15 consecutive days of therapeutic home visiting, the individual shall be considered a new admission on return to the facility."

The manual states these as limits on what South Dakota Medicaid will reimburse; it does not restate ARSD 44:73:11:03(3)'s own readmission-rights language, and no first-party source reviewed states a single combined bed-hold period covering every kind of absence.

The three rows above hoist the questions a facility's counsel answers in the first fifteen minutes and a resident's family almost never finds alone. They are quotations from South Dakota'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 — ARSD 44:73:11:14(2): the facility must notify "in writing at least thirty days before the transfer or discharge unless a change in the resident's health requires immediate transfer or discharge or the resident has not resided in the facility for thirty days."

Ninety days to a fair-hearing decision — Department of Social Services Fair Hearings page: "In most cases, the ALJ must issue a final decision within 90 days (60 days in food stamp cases) after your hearing request." No first-party source ties this general hearing route by name to a facility's own transfer-or-discharge decision; see Requesting the hearing, above.

Five consecutive reserve bed days — South Dakota Medicaid Billing and Policy Manual, Skilled Nursing Facility and Nursing Facility Services: "South Dakota Medicaid covers a maximum of 5 consecutive reserve bed days for a recipient."

Fifteen consecutive therapeutic leave days — the same manual: "The recipient may be absent from the nursing facility for a maximum of fifteen consecutive days."

Twenty-four hours to keep additional leave days available — the same manual: "Additional reserve bed days are only covered if the recipient returns to the nursing facility for 24 hours or more." For therapeutic leave: "Before any more therapeutic leave days may be taken, the recipient must return to the facility for 24 hours."

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

Source map

Captured: all six, in tools/packets/south-dakota-packet.txt. Pending: SDCL Title 34, chapter 12 (the statute ARSD 44:73:11:14 itself cites as "General Authority" and "Law Implemented"), not independently captured; a first-party document tying a nursing facility's own transfer-or-discharge decision to the Department of Social Services' Office of Administrative Hearings fair-hearing route (ARSD 67:17:02:03) or to any other named hearing office; the State Long-Term Care Ombudsman's individual name and title; ARSD chapter 44:70:09 (the assisted-living-center resident-rights chapter, out of this project's v1 scope); and Internet Archive submission.

Change log

2026-09-25 — Deepened to a full page: section 01 (the grounds, as South Dakota describes them) and section 02 (the published process, including the notice's required contents, bed-hold and return, and the notice-periods register) written for the first time. Recaptured sources 1–5 through the standing recipe (tools/recipes/south-dakota.json, digest 634cc3da5d2b, previously f707387848dc) and added one new source. Transports: sources 1 and 2 reused the recipe's sdlegislature.gov JSON-API capture already in place; source 3 reused the recipe's curl capture of the Department of Social Services' Fair Hearings page; source 4 (dhs.sd.gov, a client-rendered application) was captured by loading the rendered page in the session browser and reading its main element's text directly, as the recipe already documents; source 5 reused the recipe's curl capture of the Dakota at Home directory listing. New source 6, the South Dakota Medicaid Billing and Policy Manual for Skilled Nursing Facility and Nursing Facility Services (dss.sd.gov, a directly linked PDF with no session token), was fetched by curl and extracted with pdftotext -layout, sliced from its "Nursing Facility Leave Days" heading to "Out-of-State Services." Confirmed no drift in sources 1, 2, 3, and 5 against the 2026-09-22 recipe capture. Source 4's re-fetch is two lines shorter than the 2026-09-22 capture: the page no longer repeats its section headings as a standalone in-page navigation list ahead of "Services" — a cosmetic change to the page's own markup, not to any quoted text, and none of this page's quotations from source 4 fall in the dropped lines. Findings, continuing the numbering below: (5) ARSD 44:73:11:03(3) requires a facility to give each resident a written description of the facility's own bed-hold policy but does not itself set a bed-hold period; the state's own Medicaid Billing and Policy Manual, not the licensure rule, is what states a specific number of days — 5 consecutive reserve bed days for a hospital stay, 15 consecutive days for a non-medical (therapeutic) leave — and those limits describe what South Dakota Medicaid will reimburse, not a resident's readmission right under the rule. (6) The Department of Social Services' Fair Hearings page states that a fair-hearing decision issues "within 90 days (60 days in food stamp cases) after your hearing request," but, as already recorded in finding (1), no first-party source ties this general Office of Administrative Hearings route by name to a facility's own transfer-or-discharge decision under ARSD 44:73:11:14(4); no pendency provision for that decision was found either, searched in ARSD chapter 44:73:11 and chapter 67:17:02 in full and the Department's own Fair Hearings page. Capture pending: per the source map. Internet Archive: not yet submitted. Reviewer: Carrie Schluter, reviewed 2026-09-25. Corrections: hello@fieldassembly.net.

2026-09-02 — Baseline page built from the first South Dakota packet: docket, lede, source map, change log. Not yet captured or written: section 01 (the grounds, as South Dakota 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). Transports: sdlegislature.gov (South Dakota Legislature) renders its rule pages, and even the Word-download and printer-friendly endpoints reached from them, as a client-side application with no rule text present in the HTML returned to curl, even with a browser user agent (confirmed on articles 44:73 and 44:70 — 2.6–3.1 MB of application shell, zero rule text). The application's own JSON API, reached at a URL of the form https://sdlegislature.gov/api/Rules/44%3A73 (colons URL-encoded, no query hash or session token), returns the full article as JSON with the rule text in an "Html" field; Sources 1 and 2 were captured this way and sliced on the chapter — from the chapter's own heading to the next chapter's or section's own heading — with the head and tail of each slice checked against the surrounding numbered sections before capture. Source 3 (the Department of Social Services' Fair Hearings page) was retrieved by curl with a browser user agent and extracted by stripping HTML tags and collapsing whitespace, mechanically. Sources 4 and 5 (the Department of Human Services' Ombudsman Program page and the department's own Dakota at Home directory listing) likewise render only a client-side application shell to curl even with a browser user agent; both were captured by loading the rendered page in a browser tool and reading the page's own text content directly, checked character-by-character for curly versus straight apostrophes before quotation. Findings: (1) ARSD 44:73:11:14(4) requires a facility's transfer-or-discharge policy to include "A description of how the resident may appeal a decision by the facility to transfer or discharge the resident." — it does not itself name any office, form, or deadline for that appeal. Separately, ARSD 67:17:02:03 and the Department of Social Services' own Fair Hearings page designate the department's Office of Administrative Hearings, at 700 Governors Drive, Pierre, SD 57501 (605.773.6851, admhrngs@state.sd.us), to hear appeals of "a Department of Social Services action or inaction regarding the supplemental nutrition assistance program or medical assistance program" — no first-party document located ties a nursing facility's own transfer-or-discharge decision to that hearing route by name; both are quoted as published and the connection between them is not asserted here. (2) ARSD 44:73:11:14(2) requires the facility to notify "the resident or the resident's legal representative and state ombudsman in writing at least thirty days before the transfer or discharge" — naming the state ombudsman as a required notice recipient — but, unlike some other states' rules, does not itself require that the notice given to the resident state the ombudsman's own mailing address or telephone number. (3) The Department of Human Services publishes the Long-Term Care Ombudsman Program's mailing address two different ways: the program's own page gives "Division of Long Term Services and Supports" "Hillsview Plaza, 3800 E Hwy 34" "c/o 500 E. Capitol Avenue" "Pierre, SD 57501", while the department's own Dakota at Home directory listing gives "3800 E. Highway 34, Pierre, SD 57501"; both are quoted as published and not reconciled. (4) The nursing-facility residents'-rights rule now at ARSD chapter 44:73:11 states in its own Source lines that each section was "transferred from" a same-numbered section of former article 44:04 — for example, § 44:73:11:14's own citation reads "transferred from § 44:04:17:14, 42 SDR 51, effective October 13, 2015" — recorded here because the article number under which this project's build instructions first looked for South Dakota's rule no longer holds the rule's current text. Capture pending: per the source map. Internet Archive: not yet submitted. Reviewer: Carrie Schluter, reviewed 2026-09-02. Corrections: hello@fieldassembly.net.