The Biden Administration has proposed a wide range of changes in the regulation of nursing homes. They include efforts to require minimum staffing levels; limit shared rooms; enhance inspections, penalties, and transparency; and crack down on owners with a history of poor quality. The plan also would expand a technical assistance program to help operators improve their quality of care. [...]
By now, you’ve probably heard about the desperate shortage of nurses and aides in nursing homes and long-term care facilities. This workforce crisis not only hurts their residents, it also is creating severe backups in hospitals, putting both patients and the facilities themselves at risk and increasing health care costs. As those staffing shortages course through the entire health care [...]
With nursing homes and other long-term care facilities desperately short of nurses and aides, it is more important than ever for consumers to know about staffing levels, quality, and turnover. But it has been difficult to get some key information. Now, the government has taken a modest step to help. In January, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) [...]
The covid-19 pandemic drove a collapse in both patient volume and revenue for post-acute care in skilled nursing facilities (SNFs). And while patient numbers have increased modestly since the worst of the pandemic, they remain far below 2019 and probably are financially unsustainable for the SNFs. At the same time, bipartisan federal legislation in the House and Senate would create [...]
The shortage of staff in long-term facilities and home care agencies has gone from a problem to a crisis. Three rural nursing homes in Maine close because they cannot hire enough staff to maintain care for patients and residents. A nursing home in Oklahoma shuts its doors due to a staff shortages. Same in Kansas. A new industry survey reports [...]
Not since the 1960s have so many critical policy issues that affect older adults come together in Congress at one time. Over the next few months, lawmakers will decide whether to both increase and fundamentally refocus federal support for older adults and younger people with disabilities. Those reforms would assist those who need long-term services and supports and many healthy [...]
In an attempt to get a handle on the persistent Covid-19 pandemic, President Biden yesterday issued a broad executive order mandating vaccines for a large segment of the US economy, including most of the medical and long-term care industries. His order should give families comfort that most licensed providers, from doctors to home health aides, will be vaccinated. But it [...]
It is time to change the rules: If you want to work around vulnerable older adults. You must be vaccinated. For their safety. For yours. And for the safety of your own family. Eight months after the vaccine was made widely available to health care workers, only about 60 percent of nursing home staff has been vaccinated against COVID-19. We [...]
Every conversation I have with operators of senior living facilities and home care agencies quickly pivots to one issue: A desperate shortage of care workers. The problem isn’t new. Low pay, low status, and physically and emotionally demanding work has plagued the long-term care industry’s ability to hire for years. Highly restrictive Trump-era immigration policies further shrunk the supply of [...]
How bad was the covid-19 pandemic for nursing homes residents? A new government study finds that 40 percent had the virus, or probably did. About 169,000 more Medicare residents died in the pandemic year of 2020 than in 2019, an increase in the overall death rate of about 32 percent. And in April 2020, about 1,000 more Medicare residents were [...]