The Biden administration finalized on Monday the first-ever minimum staffing rule at nursing homes, Vice President Kamala Harris announced.
The controversial mandate requires that all nursing homes that receive Medicare and Medicaid funding provide a total of at least 3.48 hours of nursing care per resident per day, including defined periods from registered nurses and from nurse aides. That means a facility with 100 residents would need at least two or three registered nurses and at least 10 or 11 nurse aides, as well as two additional nurse staff, who could be registered nurses, licensed professional nurses or nurse aides, per shift, according to a White House fact sheet.
Plus, nursing homes must have a registered nurse onsite at all times. The mandate will be phased in, with rural communities having longer timeframes, and temporary exemptions will be available for facilities in areas with workforce shortages that demonstrate a good faith effort to hire.
The rule, which was first proposed in September and initially called for at least three hours of daily nursing care per resident, is aimed at addressing nursing homes that are chronically understaffed, which can lead to sub-standard or unsafe care, the White House said.
A huge amount of nurses have left the field in the last decade. This has been due to poor wages, poor working conditions, and more pressure on nurses. They all burned out.
During Covid, even when we were all clapping for nurses, instead of giving pay raises they’d rather hire contractors and travel nurses to fill positions because pay raises are permanent. A whole bunch of nurses I know left to do temporary travel, sometimes at the hospital they already worked at. This created huge amounts of resentment and nurses left in droves.
The consolidation of our hospitals and health facilities into the hands of a few small companies is leading to a huge collapse of our healthcare, and it is all their own making.
This all started 30 years ago when hospitals stopped being run by a chief medical officer and a chief nursing officer, and instead began being run by MBAs who only looked at numbers and short term profits. Drs and Nurses have no autonomy anymore and are treated like workers on an assembly line.
Get rid of the MBAs. Break up HCA, Tenant, and the other big chains, require all health facilities to be non profits, and maybe we’ll see people who actually want to work in the medical profession again.