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Policy Changes Have Direct Effect on Nursing Home Care |
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From EurekAlert! - Breaking News: States that set high staffing standards for elder care in nursing homes are the only ones that come close to having enough staff nurses to prevent serious safety violations, according to a new study by a professor in the UCSF School of Nursing. The majority of the nation's elderly and disabled in nursing homes remain in situations where staffing is well below national recommendations for safe care, the study found. While no states have ideal nursing levels, those states with higher Medicaid reimbursements or higher mandated nursing levels have come closer to meeting the recommendations, according to the analysis published in the June issue of the journal "Health Services Research." "For years, families have struggled with low staffing levels in the nursing homes that care for their elderly family members, but very few studies have assessed how to change that on a broad level," Harrington said. She examined the hours that nurses worked in nursing homes in 2002 and analyzed the data against two variables: Medicaid reimbursement rates and the range of acuity in patient care. Medicaid pays for 67 percent of all nursing home residents in the United States, but only covers 51 percent of the $103 billion in total nursing home costs. This study found that nursing homes located in states that had increased their minimum standards for registered nursing hours had higher registered-nurse staffing levels. For example, a 10 percent increase in state minimum staffing standards would result in an increase of 1.66 hours per resident-day (or 16.6 hours for every 100 residents) in actual staffing, if all other factors remain equal, Harrington said.
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