Following up on LeadingAge’s late summer outreach and offer of collaboration on plans to invest $75 million toward the creation and launch of a national nursing home staffing campaign, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) recently expressed thanks for examples we shared of promising programs and strategies employed by several of our state partners and members, calling them “especially helpful as we continue to work to identify the best ways to improve nurse recruitment and access to nurse assistant training.”

Our August 1 letter, part of our engagement with CMS launched in Spring of 2024 regarding its promised $75 million effort included in the April 2024 final nursing home staffing mandate, aimed to provide ideas and resources with the potential to enhance that campaign. We wrote, “… we know that the existing and growing need for nurses in nursing homes will not be met alone by this initial effort.”

Drawing on experience demonstrating that traditional recruitment methods alone are insufficient to meet the growing demand for caregivers and nurses, our workforce resources focus on diversifying recruitment methods to reach a broader pool of potential applicants, as well as initiatives developed and executed by our members and state partners that have proven to be promising.

Highlights include:

• Our 2022 market analysis of potential aging services employees and the development of public outreach and messaging. The findings highlighted positive perceptions of the sector and a strong willingness to work with older adults.
• Targeted communication strategies, tested themes and language developed from these insights as well as key job attributes that attract employees. Adding to public outreach and messaging, the job search platform CaringGene was presented from the Iroquois Healthcare Association (IHA). This is a multi-media recruitment campaign aiming to increase the applicant pool.
• Pipeline-building initiatives:
  • Minnesota Long Term Care Nurse Loan Forgiveness Program and the Nursing Facility Workforce Incentive Grant Program, that help staff to receive repayment or incentive grants for working in aging services and nursing homes, specifically.
  • Wisconsin’s government funded opportunity to develop a workforce pipeline with training and wrap around services for low to moderate income individuals.
  • High-school Licensed Practical Nursing coursework to start investing in early pipelines that could offset the nursing instructor crisis
  • Kentucky HealthCorps, the first-of-its-kind AmeriCorp program in health care, stating this type of program could be expanded to include newly licensed nurses or experienced nurses willing to change settings to long term care.

CMS promised to reach out to LeadingAge to discuss some of the examples included in our letter, share more details on the staffing campaign and obtain feedback.

LeadingAge will continue to have dialogue with CMS as the campaign is developed and implemented.