The understaffing problem in the roughly 15,000 nursing homes in the US is under scrutiny, with critics claiming that the Biden administration’s plan for improvement has been ‘sabotaged’.

Driving the news: Last year, the Biden administration pledged to set minimum staffing levels in nursing homes, but a recent study commissioned by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) failed to recommend specific staffing levels.
* The report argued that no single staffing level can guarantee quality care but did suggest that higher staffing levels might lead to improvements such as fewer hospitalisations and faster service.
* Critics argue that this report indicates that the government will not fulfil its promise to establish robust staffing levels.

The Concern: The CMS’s delay in proposing new rules, already six months behind its self-set deadline, has raised concerns about the potential risk to the 1.2 million Americans in skilled nursing facilities.
* The nursing home industry has been lobbying against the implementation of a patient-to-nurse ratio, arguing that each nursing home is unique, and no single solution fits all facilities.
* Patient advocates, however, fear that the delay would put nursing home residents at greater risk of neglect and abuse due to understaffing.

Worker shortage: The industry makes a case for the difficulty in finding workers willing to take up the demanding and low-paying jobs in nursing homes.
* Nursing home groups say that their nurses are often lured away by better-paying hospital jobs.
* The issue of increased government funding through state Medicaid programs to hire more workers has been raised, while critics argue that for-profit nursing homes could afford to pay more and hire additional staff by giving up some of their profits.

By the numbers: The study evaluated four minimum staffing levels, all below the ideal 4.1 daily staff hours identified in a previous study.
* The highest level in the new study was 3.88 daily staff hours which estimated that 0.6% of residents would get delayed care and would cost an extra $5.3 billion each year.
* The lowest level was 3.3 daily staffing hours, at which it was estimated that 3.3% of residents would get delayed care and would cost an additional $1.5 billion each year.

View original article on NPR

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