Vice President Kamala Harris announced Monday that Biden’s leadership has finalized the first minimum staffing for nursing homes.
The move comes in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, in which advocates for the elderly objected to residents’ poor living conditions, in which they spent hours without food or water and were well maintained. The pandemic claimed the lives of more than 167,000 nursing home residents. , and subsequently staffing levels were particularly reduced.
The rule will require all Medicaid and Medicare-funded services to provide a total of at least 3. 48 hours of care per resident per day. That means a facility with 100 citizens would need at least two or three registered nurses, 10 or 11 orderlies and two more nurses depending on the shift, according to a White House fact sheet. The rule, proposed in September, aims to crack down on unsafe care practices discovered in understaffed nursing homes and also to keep “workers from overworking,” the White House said. .
“When services are understaffed, citizens can go without essentials like toilets, trips to the bathroom, and food, and even less so when citizens have a medical emergency,” the fact sheet says.
However, retirement home operators say they are already struggling to fill jobs and it is felt that the mandate could simply lead to the closure of the facilities.
A study by the American Health Care Association, which groups 14,000 nursing homes serving five million people a year, found that the mandate would require nursing homes to hire more than 100,000 additional nurses and caregivers. This would constitute an annual fee of $6. 8 dólares. mil million. The research also found that 94% of homes did not meet at least one staffing requirement.
“While nearly every single nursing home in the country would be considered non-compliant with this measure if this measure went into effect today, it demonstrates how out of touch Washington bureaucrats are with reality,” said Mark Parkinson, executive director of the American Health Care Association/National Center for Assisted Living. he said in a statement. We all need to strengthen the nursing home workforce, but this policy is surely not the right way to do it. “
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That mandate did not require congressional approval, but a bipartisan Senate bill would prohibit the Department of Health and Human Services from finalizing the rule. Fearing widespread closures of nursing homes and care facilities, nearly a hundred House members wrote letters to HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra. in October.
The mandate will provide rural services with a longer duration and offer transitional exemptions for institutions that are already struggling to fill positions.