How to deal with a superior (supervisor) who is not willing to address important risk management issues in a longterm care facility?Hired as the...

This is common in the military.  The commander (or in your case, the Administrator) is indeed too busy to be immersed in decision making.  What the Administrator needs is to be able to briefly provide guidance during the decision making process and then to make the decision based on your recommendation.

Basically, here's how to make that happen.

1)  Identify your problem.  This is simple, but needs to be stated to all who are involved in the decision.

2)  Analyze the problem.  Collect facts, statistics, laws, restrictions, costs, the boss's personal preferences, etc.  State any assumptions you are making during the decision making process.  Identify requirements that your organization MUST meet, both specified and implied.

3)  Develop courses of action that will solve your problem.  There may be many courses of action, and many may not exclude each other.  When you recommend a decision to the boss, make sure she knows what courses of action you considered.  Now may be a good time to present these to her as part of the process, so you don't spend a lot of time later on a wild goose chase.  Now is also the time to decide what criteria you will use later when you analyze these courses of action.  In other words, what will make a course of action better than another.  Often, cost is one of these criteria.  Other criteria may include speed, efficiency, difficulty, etc.  In other words, one course of action may be cheaper but slower than another, while another may be cheap but difficult.

4)  Analyze and compare the courses of action.  Using the criteria from before, analyze how effective each course of action is and compare it to the others.

5)  Make your recommendation, using all of this information.  Your boss will appreciate being able to make an INFORMED decision.  She may not go with your recommendation, but all is not lost.  She still is considering all your input, but often has a different viewpoint.

All of this is very loosely based on the Military Decision Making Process, which takes college-educated Army officers a career to master.  Good luck!