More is not always better, especially when talking about the number of employees in a nursing home trying to battle infectious outbreaks such as COVID-19, or even less dangerous annual influenza strains.
Widespread reports of severe staffing shortages being felt across the entire long-term care industry has been a key issue for providers during the ongoing public health crisis.
Many recovering skilled nursing patients can be discharged to home a week or more earlier without compromising their health, researchers said in a Health Affairs study released Monday afternoon.
Skilled nursing’s employee turnover problem — long linked to issues with quality of care — is much worse than previously reported, according to a massive analysis published Monday.
The first academic study of its kind has found that the first three months of nursing homes’ overhauled Medicare payment system at the end of 2019 led to a distinct drop-off in the employed number of licensed therapists and therapy aides.
Imposing strict audits of nursing home cost reports and establishing more requirements for ownership changes would allow President Joe Biden’s administration to address persistent accountability and transparency problems that experts say have plagued the industry.
The needs of immigrant workers should be a top concern of nursing home operators during the coronavirus pandemic in order to prevent severe workforce shortages within the industry and protect the high-risk population from contracting the disease.
Nursing home operators may have better luck using saliva-based, rapid antigen testing for screening COVID-19 within their facilities over polymerase chaise reaction (PRC) nasal swab because of the tool’s ability to judge how infectious people are, a pair of researchers suggested in a new blog published in Health Affairs.
Nursing homes with a unionized workforce were less likely to have COVID-19 deaths when compared to facilities without healthcare worker unions, according to a study in Health Affairs. The findings support other investigations that have linked unions with improved safety and health standards for workers, according to researchers.
Now is the opportunity for providers, policymakers and other stakeholders to aggressively reform the long-term services and supports system after its underlying weaknesses were exposed under pandemic conditions, experts argue in a new Health Affairs blog post.
