SHOTS HEALTH NEWS – The Biden administration is establishing new standards for how much time each day a nursing home resident gets direct care from a nurse or an aide.
The Biden administration finalized nursing home staffing rules Monday that will require thousands of them to hire more nurses and aides — while giving them years to do so.
The new rules from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services are the most substantial changes to federal oversight of the nation’s roughly 15,000 nursing homes in more than three decades. But they are less stringent than what patient advocates said was needed to provide high-quality care.
Spurred by disproportionate deaths from COVID-19 in long-term care facilities, the rules aim to address perennially sparse staffing that can be a root cause of missed diagnoses, severe bedsores, and frequent falls.
“For residents, this will mean more staff, which means fewer ER visits potentially, more independence,” Vice President Kamala Harris said while meeting with nursing home workers in La Crosse, Wisconsin. “For families, it’s going to mean peace of mind in terms of your loved one being taken care of.”
When the regulations are fully enacted, 4 in 5 homes will need to augment their payrolls, CMS estimated. But the new standards are likely to require slight if any improvements for many of the 1.2 million residents in facilities that are already quite close to or meet the minimum levels.
‘Established a floor’
“Historically, this is a big deal, and we’re glad we have now established a floor,” Blanca Castro, California’s long-term care ombudsman, said in an interview.
“From here we can go upward, recognizing there will be a lot of complaints about where we are going to get more people to fill these positions.”
The rules primarily address staffing levels for three types of nursing home workers. Registered nurses, or RNs, are the most skilled and responsible for guiding overall care and setting treatment plans …
