Vice President Kamala Harris announced on Monday that the Biden administration has finalized the first-ever minimum staffing requirements for nursing homes.
The move comes after the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw advocates for the elderly reporting poor living conditions for residents in which they’d go hours without meals and water and were not kept properly clean. The pandemic claimed the lives of more than 167,000 nursing home residents, and afterward, there was a dramatic drop in staffing.
The rule will require all Medicaid- and Medicare-funded facilities to provide a total of at least 3.48 hours of care per resident per day. This means that a facility with 100 residents would need at least two or three registered nurses, 10 or 11 aides, and two additional nursing staff per shift, according to a White House fact sheet. The rule, proposed back in September, looks to address unsafe care practices found in understaffed nursing homes and also to ensure that “workers aren’t stretched too thin,” the White House said.
“When facilities are understaffed, residents may go without basic necessities like baths, trips to the bathroom, and meals — and it is less safe when residents have a medical emergency,” the fact sheet read.
However, nursing home operators say they are already struggling to fill positions, and there is a fear that the mandate could cause facilities to close.
An analysis by the American Health Care Association, which represents 14,000 nursing homes that care for 5 million people annually, found this mandate would require nursing homes to hire more than 100,000 additional nurses and nursing aides. This would come at an annual cost of $6.8 billion. The analysis also found that 94% of homes failed to meet at least one staffing requirement.
“We are extremely disappointed and troubled that the Biden administration is resolved to issue this unfunded staffing mandate despite overwhelming concerns from experts, stakeholders, and policymakers on both sides of the aisle. While it may be well intentioned, the federal staffing mandate is an unreasonable standard that only threatens to shut down more nursing homes, displace hundreds of thousands of residents, and restrict seniors’ access to care,” AHCA President and CEO Mark Parkinson said in a statement to the Washington Examiner.
“It is unconscionable that the administration is finalizing this rule given our nation’s changing demographics and growing caregiver shortage. Issuing a final rule that demands hundreds of thousands of additional caregivers when there’s a nationwide shortfall of nurses just creates an impossible task for providers. This unfunded mandate doesn’t magically solve the nursing crisis,” he added.
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This mandate did not require Congress’s approval, but a bipartisan Senate bill would prohibit the Department of Health and Human Services from finalizing the rule. Fearing a widespread closure of nursing homes and care facilities, nearly 100 House members wrote letters to HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra back in October.
The mandate will give rural facilities a longer time frame and provide temporary exemptions to facilities already struggling to fill positions.
