During a crisis, sufficient staffing is critical to a nursing home’s ability to care for their residents. In the months leading up to the Covid-19 pandemic, most facilities failed to maintain sufficient staffing to meet every resident’s needs.
The latest data on staffing for every U.S. nursing home can help you identify and assess the extent to which nursing homes in your community have provided sufficient staffing to meet basic clinical and quality of life needs. The data is for the most recent period reported by the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).
See www.nursinghome411.org to download easy-to-use files for every state that include:
- The levels of care staff that a facility has for its residents;
- Staffing levels for important non-nursing staff, including administrators and activities staff; and
- The extent to which the facility relies on contract workers to provide resident care.
The individual state files are easily sortable to facilitate ease of use. For example, a state file can be sorted to identify which facilities have the highest and lowest reported levels of certified nursing assistant (CNA) care.
The report also includes staffing averages and rankings for all states and Washington, DC. The latest data indicate that nursing homes provide an average of 3.37 total care staff hours per resident day (HPRD). The national averages are well below the amount of time necessary to ensure that residents receive sufficient clinical care.
Nursing homes are prone to have significant fluctuation in staffing and often have very low staffing on specific days such as weekends and holidays. Though the report accounts for staffing fluctuations by averaging all observations, data on staffing for specific days can be found by searching for a nursing home in the CMS dataset.
Coronavirus has resulted in more than 30,000 fatalities and 150,000 cases in 7,000 long-term care facilities through May 14, 2020. Staffing shortages have exacerbated issues in facilities nationwide before and during the pandemic. LTCCC will continue monitoring and publishing staffing data as they are reported by CMS in order to inform the public about facility conditions during the coronavirus.
Click here for information on planning for nursing home care or call Robert Friedman, Attorney at (716)542-5444.