Roane General Hospital: PASARR Screening Failures - WV
The September 2025 inspection of the Spencer facility turned up 12 deficiencies in total. One of them involved PASARR, the Pre-Admission Screening and Resident Review program, a federal screening requirement that exists for a single, specific reason: to ensure that people with mental disorders or intellectual disabilities don't end up warehoused in nursing facilities that can't meet their needs, or that they don't get admitted to nursing homes at all when a better option is available.
Inspectors cited the hospital under federal tag F0645, which covers those PASARR screenings. The scope and severity level was a D, meaning the problem was isolated and no actual harm to any resident was documented. But regulators determined the potential for more than minimal harm was there.
That distinction matters, and it's easy to underestimate. A Level D finding doesn't mean nothing went wrong. It means inspectors found a real gap in a protective process, couldn't point to a specific resident who was hurt because of it, but concluded the gap was serious enough that harm was a genuine possibility.
PASARR exists because nursing home admission has historically been the path of least resistance for people with serious mental health conditions or intellectual disabilities, even when those settings were wrong for them. The screening is supposed to function as a checkpoint. A person flagged through PASARR gets evaluated by the state, which then determines whether the nursing facility can provide what that person needs, or whether a psychiatric hospital, community program, or some other setting would serve them better.
When that screening doesn't happen correctly, the checkpoint disappears. A resident with a serious mental illness might be placed without any formal evaluation of whether the facility has the staff, training, or programming to support them. A person with an intellectual disability might enter a nursing home when an alternative setting was available and better suited. No one catches it because the process designed to catch it was skipped.
The facility reported correcting the deficiency by November 11, 2025, roughly seven weeks after inspectors flagged it.
What the inspection report doesn't say is how many residents were affected, what specifically went wrong in the screening process, or whether any of the 12 deficiencies cited during that same visit were connected to one another. Inspection reports at this scope often don't. A D-level finding produces a citation, a correction deadline, and a line in the public record. It doesn't always produce a full account of what a resident experienced while the gap existed.
Roane General Hospital operates in Roane County, a rural part of West Virginia where access to specialized mental health care and disability services has long been limited. That context doesn't appear in the inspection report, but it shapes the stakes of a finding like this one. In places where alternatives are scarce and nursing facilities serve as a default for people with complex needs, a screening process that works correctly is one of the few formal mechanisms designed to push back against that default when it isn't the right fit.
The other 11 deficiencies cited during the September inspection aren't detailed in this report. Twelve citations in a single inspection is not a minor tally, and PASARR compliance was only one thread in that broader picture.
What the record shows is a facility that failed, in at least one instance, to carry out a screening designed to protect some of the most vulnerable people in its care — people whose conditions made them eligible for a formal, independent evaluation of whether they were in the right place. That evaluation is not a formality. It is the mechanism. And for at least one resident, or more, it did not work as it was supposed to.
The facility says it fixed the problem in November. The inspection that found it happened in September. Whatever occurred in the space between a resident's admission and the moment inspectors arrived is not part of the public record.
Full Inspection Report
The details above represent a summary of key findings. View the complete inspection report for Roane General Hospital from 2025-09-25 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 19, 2026 · Our methodology
ROANE GENERAL HOSPITAL in SPENCER, WV was cited for violations during a health inspection on September 25, 2025.
The September 2025 inspection of the Spencer facility turned up 12 deficiencies in total.
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.