Nursing homes will have to maintain minimum staffing levels under a Biden administration proposal despite furious lobbying from the industry, which says it will be too onerous amid a continuing labor shortage.
Biden administration officials said the first-ever national staffing rule would require nursing homes that participate in Medicare and Medicaid to provide a minimum of 0.55 hours of care from a registered nurse per resident a day, and 2.45 hours of care from a nurse aide per resident a day. A registered nurse would be required to be on-site at all times and nursing-home care assessments would be strengthened under the proposal.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services estimates that about 75% of nursing homes would have to strengthen staffing in their facilities under the proposal. The proposed staffing standard exceeds those existing in nearly all states.
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The administration said it also plans to launch a national initiative to tackle the staffing shortage in the nursing-home industry. It will invest more than $75 million in financial incentives such as scholarships and tuition reimbursement to support staffing prospects for nursing homes.
It’s not a labour shortage though. Pay people more and they’ll come work.
Nursing homes cost $9k a month and they pack them in like sardines. I’m sure they can pay $5/hr more and add a few more staff.
Shareholders don’t like that. How dare you even point that out!
If you’re lucky it’s 9k. It was about 13k for my mom before she died. We feel it was a mistake to do that and we pulled her out because we could take better care of her at home with some hired help for when we were exhausted.
The CNAs were understaffed, undertrained and underpaid and had to deal with some literally crazy people wacked out from dementia and other brain rot that wrote simply made them violent and angry. The people that have to endure that daily need to be paid more, period. We need to start telling our kids that if they want to serve the country, don’t go into them military - go into healthcare. I’d story giving them an equivalent to the GI Bill.
Thank God at least something is being done about this. I don’t think it’s perfect, because I feel like the requirements they’re imposing will barely help most patients deal with basic daily tasks. Even so this is way better than little to no coverage at all.
Wow, scholarships and tuition reimbursement meaning it’s not free. How the fuck is that an incentive? How about raise the pay so caregivers aren’t living out of their car? Or tent? I hate this tone deaf bullshit. The incentive is to pay someone what it’s worth to put up with someone’s demented abusive grandpa. Pay up or it will be taken from you. Not a threat. Just a fact of human nature.
Fucking good, but not nearly far enough, IMO. I work in EMS, done it for 13 years. Almost anyone working in EMS can tell you some horror stories about almost any nursing home in their area, I know I can. They’re basically medicare farms, and the elderly and disabled are the livestock.
Used to work in EMS, now just a lowly vollie, can’t agree with you more. I’d rather die before going to a nursing home, even the good ones. Those of us in EMS see the things no one else sees, we see what the state doesn’t see when they do their inspections, we see what is hidden from the families. But when we speak up, does anyone ever listen to us? Nope. I don’t know how any “civilised” society can be ok with treating their elderly the way we treat ours. Places where if you are standing in one place you have to keep shifting from foot to foot because if you actually stand still your boots will stick to the floor, residents in beds with sheets that look like they haven’t been changed in weeks, people crying for help all through the hallways, and just the general neglect and ignorance by staff, and when you do get staff who aren’t burned out and still care they are so overwhelmed by the patient ratios there’s still only so much they can do.
