The Biden administration has announced new requirements for nursing homes, including minimum levels of front-line caregivers. The policy, announced by Vice President Harris, requires nursing homes that receive federal funding to provide residents with certain hours of care from registered nurses and nurse aides.
The final rule also requires facilities to have a registered nurse on staff 24/7. Nursing homes would also be required to provide residents with at least 0.55 hours of care from a registered nurse every day, as well as 2.45 hours of care from a nurse aide. The combined three hours falls short of what a key federal study from 2001 found; at a minimum, it said facilities should provide 4.1 hours of direct care per resident per day to ensure they’re safe from falls and other harms.
But most U.S. nursing homes don’t meet that standard, and advocates said residents are generally sicker and need more care now than 20 years ago. The requirements of the rule will be introduced in phases, with longer timeframes for rural communities. Limited, temporary exemptions will be available for both the 24/7 registered nurse requirement and the underlying staffing standards for nursing homes in workforce shortage areas that demonstrate a good faith effort to hire.
Advocates have been calling for such a requirement for more than two decades, arguing that residents are safer and have better care with more staff, but the industry had successfully resisted. Then the coronavirus pandemic hit. More than 200,000 nursing home residents and staff died from the virus, exacerbating the existing concerns and forcing federal officials into action.
