Complete Care at Hyattsville: Advance Directive Failures - MD
The violation, documented during a complaint inspection on September 24, 2025, falls under a category that cuts to the center of what nursing home residents are legally guaranteed: the right to say no. The right to refuse a treatment. The right to participate, or not participate, in experimental research. The right to put in writing, before a crisis arrives, exactly what they want done, or not done, if they can no longer speak for themselves.
That last piece, the advance directive, is not a formality. For an elderly person living in a care facility, it is often the only mechanism they have to control what happens to their body when they are most vulnerable. Inspectors found the facility deficient in ensuring residents could exercise that right.
Complete Care at Hyattsville was cited for 21 separate deficiencies during the same inspection. This was one of them.
The severity level assigned to this particular violation was a D, meaning inspectors found it isolated in scope, with no actual harm documented at the time of the inspection. But the federal rating system does not stop there. A D-level finding also carries a formal determination that the potential for more than minimal harm existed. That distinction matters. It means inspectors concluded this was not a paperwork problem with no real-world consequence. It means residents were at risk.
The inspection was triggered by a complaint, not a routine survey cycle. That means someone, a resident, a family member, a staff member, contacted regulators with a concern serious enough to prompt a visit.
The facility has since reported a correction date of December 1, 2025, more than two months after inspectors walked through the door.
Advance directives exist because medicine can do things people do not always want done to them. A ventilator can keep a body breathing after a person has made clear, in writing, that they do not want that. A feeding tube can be inserted. Resuscitation can be attempted. Without a properly documented and honored directive, the wishes a person expressed when they were capable of expressing them can be ignored, not out of malice, but out of institutional failure to ensure those wishes were recorded, accessible, and followed.
Nursing homes are required to inform residents of this right, to help them formulate directives if they choose, and to incorporate those directives into their care. The inspection record does not describe which part of that process broke down at Complete Care at Hyattsville, or for how many residents, or in what specific way. What it records is that the breakdown happened.
The facility serves residents in Prince George's County, one of Maryland's most populous jurisdictions. The September inspection found problems across 21 areas of care and operations. Resident rights deficiencies, the category this violation falls under, are among the findings regulators take seriously precisely because they are difficult to see from the outside. A bedsore is visible. A fall leaves a record. A resident whose advance directive was never properly completed, or never honored, may have no visible injury at all. The harm, when it comes, arrives at the worst possible moment.
The correction the facility reported will not be verified until regulators return. Whether the processes that failed in September have actually changed, whether residents who needed help formulating their directives have received it, whether the staff responsible for ensuring those rights are protected have been retrained, none of that is confirmed by a self-reported correction date.
What the inspection record shows is a facility where, on the day inspectors arrived, at least one resident's right to shape their own medical future was not being protected the way it was supposed to be.
Full Inspection Report
The details above represent a summary of key findings. View the complete inspection report for Complete Care At Hyattsville from 2025-09-24 including all violations, facility responses, and corrective action plans.
Additional Resources
Data source: This article is based on inspection data downloaded directly from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) via Medicare.gov. CMS releases inspection reports in bulk; we publish the findings as documented by state surveyors in the official Form CMS-2567 Statement of Deficiencies.
Plan of correction: The CMS report we receive does not include the facility's plan of correction. Facilities submit plans of correction separately to state survey agencies and those responses may not be reflected in CMS data at the time of publication. The absence of a plan of correction in our data does not mean one was not filed. Readers who want information about corrective steps taken are encouraged to contact the facility directly or their state survey agency.
Corrections may have occurred: Inspection reports reflect conditions observed on the date of the survey. Facilities may have implemented corrections, staffing changes, additional training, or other remediation since the report was issued. We report what CMS provides and encourage readers to seek current information from the facility.
Editorial process: Inspection findings are extracted from CMS source documents and synthesized using AI, reviewed for factual accuracy against the original report by our editorial team.
Professional review: All content reviewed by Christopher F. Nesbitt, Sr., NH EMT & BU-trained Paralegal.
Last verified: September 14, 2026 · Our methodology
COMPLETE CARE AT HYATTSVILLE in HYATTSVILLE, MD was cited for violations during a health inspection on September 24, 2025.
The right to refuse a treatment.
Health inspections identify deficiencies that facilities must correct. Violations range from minor documentation issues to serious safety concerns. Review the full report below for specific details and facility response.