These reports heighten regulatory and reputational pressure on SNFs at a time when CMS is expected to propose minimum staffing standards in 2023.
Provider advocates slam ‘unfair’ media take down of nursing home staffing compliance
A major provider organization Thursday called out a newspaper’s national investigation into nursing home staffing as “unfair and mischaracterized.”
USA Today’s lengthy article focused on staffing benchmarks set by federal agencies, understaffing of facilities and the harm it causes residents and staff, and the low percentage of citations compared to the number of understaffed facilities the paper found in its investigation.
The American Health Care Association told McKnight’s Long-Term Care News in an email that USA Today’s use of the 4.1 HPRD recommendation from 2001 and CMS STRIVE calculations to analyze today’s nursing home staffing levels is unfair since nursing homes are not required to meet these standards.
— McKnight’s Long-Term Care News, December 02, 2022
USA Today Report Blasts Nursing Home Staffing Patterns, Enforcement — Industry Leaders Push Back
Leaders with industry groups pushed back on the article, saying that the focus is misplaced, with more attention needed on the workforce crisis besetting the sector.
AHCA Senior Vice President Holly Harmon was quoted in the USA TODAY article, as was an ACHA press release from the summer, which stated that 94% of nursing homes need to increase staffing to meet Biden’s prospective minimum staffing mandates, costing $10 billion a year.
“A new, federal staffing mandate without the available workforce and financial resources necessary to meet it would reinforce a punitive process that hasn’t been working for decades,” she said.
— Skilled Nursing News, December 01, 2022
Many nursing homes are poorly staffed. How do they get away with it?
Regulators have allowed thousands of nursing homes across America to flout federal staffing rules by going an entire day and night without a registered nurse on duty, a USA TODAY investigation has found.
Nearly all of them got away with it: Only 4% were cited by government inspectors. Even fewer were fined.
When other nursing home caregivers are added into the equation, one-third of U.S. facilities fell short of multiple benchmarks the federal government has created for nurse and aide staffing.
A USA TODAY investigation has documented, for the first time, how rarely the federal government enforces decades-old staffing guidelines and rules for nursing homes.
— USA Today, December 01, 2022
U.S. News & World Report nursing home ratings poke holes in CMS ratings
The media company found that only a small portion of the nation’s 15,000 nursing homes were high performing in short- or long-term rehabilitation, and only a few hundred were high performing in both.
The data team is making their figures available to journalists who want to conduct their own analysis of facilities in their state or community.
While CMS’s most recent ratings show 4,261 short-term and 5,080 long-term facilities received five stars, the U.S. News analysis found only 1,658 homes were high performing in short-term rehabilitation, 1,103 homes were high performing in long-term care and 335 were high performing in both.
— Association of Health Care Journalists, November 2022
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