Minimum Staffing Standards

Despite years of studies showing an increase of nurses on staff reduces deaths and falls in nursing home, the Trump administration has repealed the national rule requiring a registered nurse to be available around the clock at nursing homes. See article here. Moreover, Congress has also allowed his administration to throw away national minimum staffing ration (keeping a certain number of nursing staff on site depending on how many patients the site has). The previous rule was set in protect nursing home residents from unnecessary deaths and injuries.

For more context, here are some quick facts regarding nursing home staffing mandates:

• Countless studies have found that increasing the staff to resident ratio leads to less deaths and injuries.
• When California passed a state nursing home mandate, their nursing home mortality rate dropped by 4.6%
• Letting mildly ill nurses continue to work while masked still saved lives because it maintains the nurse-to-resident ratio
• New York’s attorney General also reported that understaffed homes suffer higher mortality rates.
• After seeing all of this evidence, five additional states have also mandated minimum staffing ratios in nursing homes.

This rule:

• Previously caused 94% of US nursing homes to add more staff.
• Would cause nursing homes to hire a total of 102,000 new nurses or aids.
• Could save around 13,000 lives per year, according to the Penn Davis Institute for Health Economics.
• Would improve care for 3.2 million Americans if left in place.

However, after nursing home lobbyists donated $4.8 million to the MAGAI Inc. and met with President Trump for lunch at his golf course, the President has suddenly decided that the mandate would not be worth the thousands of lives it would almost certainly save.