And the public perception of the PBJ data led quickly to congressional hearings and updates to the PBJ data submission strategies.
‘Like a Ghost Town’: Erratic Nursing Home Staffing Revealed Through New Records | The New York Times
Most nursing homes had fewer nurses and caretaking staff than they had reported to the government, according to new federal data, bolstering the long-held suspicions of many families that staffing levels were often inadequate. The records for the first time reveal frequent and significant fluctuations in day-to-day staffing, with particularly large shortfalls on weekends.
— KFF Health News (co-published in The New York Times), July 13, 2018
Look-Up: How Nursing Home Staffing Fluctuates Nationwide
Daily nursing home payroll records just released by the federal government show the number of nurses and aides dips far below average on some days and consistently plummets on weekends.
— KFF Health News, May 2, 2019
LeadingAge Counters After Senator’s Staffing Demands
“Understaffing and inaccurate reporting are issues that must be addressed. However, the PBJ system just implemented by CMS is not the problem; it is the solution created to correct the previous issue of inaccurate reporting. Give it time. As the PBJ system continues in effect, there likely will be more continuity in staffing levels reported by individual nursing homes.”
— McKnight’s Long-Term Care News, August 21, 2018
Report: Poor Staffing Ratings In Houston Nursing Homes
More than half of nursing home facilities—roughly 60 percent—examined in Houston are understaffed. Their analysis is based on an examination of the data gathered by Payroll-Based Journal (PBJ) when it conducted a study of nursing homes across the country from January to March 2018 in a report for Centers for Medicare and Medicaid.
— Houstonia Magazine, August 14, 2018
The PBJ data revealed that 7 in 10 facilities had lower staffing than when self-reported; there was a net 12% average decrease. The newspaper further claimed that the new process is still “flawed.” The Elder Justice Coalition on July 10 called for Congress to investigate.
— McKnight’s Long-Term Care News, August 9, 2018
1,400 Nursing Homes Get Lower Medicare Ratings Because of Staffing Concerns
Medicare has lowered its star ratings for staffing levels in 1 in 11 of the nation’s nursing homes — almost 1,400 of them — because they either had inadequate numbers of registered nurses or failed to provide payroll data that proved they had the required nursing coverage, federal records released last week show.
— KFF Health News, July 30, 2018
Mining a New Data Set to Pinpoint Critical Staffing Issues in Skilled Nursing Facilities
The PBJ data gives a much better look at how staffing relates to quality of care than the less precise — and too easy to inflate — staffing data Medicare had been using since 2008, which were based on two-week snapshots of staffing homes provided to inspectors. The data show staffing and occupancy on every day — an unprecedented degree of granularity that allows for new levels of inquiry.
— KFF Health News, July 30, 2018
