Search location
About 400 nursing homes have closed since 2020, according to Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services data through January 2023. Nursing and residential care facilities have cut more than 210,000 jobs. during that period, Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows.
Deb Burdsall, infection prevention specialist and board member of the Society of Infection Control Specialists and Epidemiologists, who has worked in long-term care for more than 40 people, said: Many facilities do not have the necessary staff to care for patients. year.
Employment is slowly starting to recover: Nursing homes filled an average of 3,700 jobs per month between May 2022 and January. But at that rate, it won’t be until 2027 that nursing homes staffing just reached pre-pandemic levels, according to a recent report by the American Health Care Association and the National Center for Life Support, which represents long-term and post-acute care. supplier.
“When I talk to my colleagues, all of them,” says Tonja Myers, manager of the Christian Wellness Center, a skilled nursing and rehabilitation nonprofit facility in Lynden, Washington. both are seriously short of staff, especially nurses and nursing assistants. “Without those professionals, we wouldn’t be able to take on as many admissions as in the past.”
Christian Health Care Center accepts only 4% of referred patients in 2022 due to staffing shortages, compared with 5% in 2021, 9% in 2020 and 17% in 2019.
“Without [a patient] At the previous census levels, we didn’t have the revenue we needed to keep the business running,” Myers said. “Most of our long-term care facilities are using their savings to stay afloat, and many will close within the next year or two.”
The shortage of workers has disrupted the care transition, posing potential dangers. Jean Harpel, executive director of aging services at ECRI, a patient safety organization, says prolonged waits can mean patients are not referred to appropriate post-acute facilities. tailored to their needs.
A 2022 study published in the Journal of Patient Safety found that the longer patients stay in the emergency department after they’re ready to leave the hospital, the more likely they are to have falls, the wrong medication, or other safety incidents. totally different.
Glen Roebuck, executive director of home, outpatient and elderly services at Genesis Health System, which operates six hospitals and a network of home health, hospice, and rehabilitation care capacity and long-term care, said COVID-19 outbreaks and prior authorization barriers have also impeded discharges. care facilities based in the Quad Cities area of Iowa and Illinois. Roebuck said pre-authorization processes can’t begin until a patient is about to be discharged, and insurers typically take two to five business days to respond to authorization, which takes time. hospital stay.
The slowdown could mean the transition happens after normal business hours, when skilled nursing facilities often don’t have a doctor or pharmacist on site. Any potential gap in a care plan or pharmaceutical need becomes extremely difficult to fill, he said.
“Those types of discharges pose a huge risk to the patient, as well as a regulatory risk to the facility,” Roebuck said.
A looming regulation from CMS could further restrict nursing homes, operators warn. In February 2022, the agency announced plans to implement minimum staffing requirements this spring in an effort to improve safety in skilled nursing facilities.
Nathan Schema, president and CEO of the Evangelical Lutheran Good Samaritan Society, a home and post-acute health care provider that merged with Sanford Health in 2019, said:
