October 23, 2026 Washington, DC — Statement from Katie Smith Sloan, president and CEO, LeadingAge, the association of nonprofit and mission-driven providers of aging services, including nursing homes, on the Nurses for Nursing Homes staffing initiative launch, announced today by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services:

“Quality nursing home care and staffing are tightly connected. Having a sufficient supply of registered nurses, licensed practical nurses and licensed vocational nurses is vital to our nonprofit and mission-driven members’ ability to serve older adults. We’ve long advocated for federal collaboration and sustained investment in efforts to expand and strengthen the nursing home workforce. The Nurses for Nursing Homes initiative is a welcome development. 

We are pleased to see this initiative move from concept back in late 2024 and early 2025, to implementation, with resources being directed to nursing homes in communities facing the most significant workforce shortages.

While the well-documented need for nurses in long-term care far exceeds the scope of any single program, we do appreciate CMS’s commitment to this program’s development and launch, as well as the strategic approach to its implementation and evaluation. We value the agency’s engagement with our national policy team, who’ve shared input from state partners and members, as the Nurses for Nursing Home program has developed. Now, as participation begins, we look forward to learning from the results and identifying opportunities to expand eligibility and strengthen the initiative in the future.

Going forward, we are eager to help members understand the program, engage with workforce partners and get access to resources; we’ll provide feedback that can help refine and improve the initiative as it evolves.

We are also encouraged that the initiative includes support to strengthen the survey workforce. Well-trained surveyors are an important component of oversight to ensure quality care, and we hope this effort helps foster a relationship between providers and surveyors that is grounded in mutual respect and a shared commitment to residents and quality outcomes. An enhanced survey workforce is one of the many survey reforms we’ve long advocated.

This program will not solve the workforce crisis on its own, but it is certainly a meaningful start. We look forward to continuing our work with CMS, state partners, and nursing home providers across the country to build on this momentum as we continue to work to expand the workforce for providers across the full aging services ecosystem.”