The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure on  June 10 responded to LeadingAge’s April 26 letter asking questions about and offering to partner on the agency’s $75 million national nursing home staffing campaign to increase the number of nurses in nursing homes.

CMS in its letter notes the comprehensive research it is conducting to inform the structure of the campaign, and also points to the Nursing Home Staffing Mandate Fact Sheet and FAQ, posted on CMS’s Nursing Home Resource Center, as resources for more details on the awareness campaign and the timeline of financial incentives for nurses to work in nursing homes. CMS says those incentives will begin to be distributed in 2025.

The FAQ states the following:

Q22. Where is the $75 million coming from, and why don’t you just use it to increase nurses’ salaries?

A22. This initiative will be funded using federal civil money penalty (CMP) funds that are collected when CMS imposes a CMP on nursing homes for certain types of noncompliance. CMP funds have specific statutory and regulatory allowances and prohibitions for use. They can only be used to improve the quality of care for nursing home residents. They cannot be used to support individuals or patients in any other type of health care setting. Also, they cannot be used to supplant or supplement existing funding sources. For example, nursing homes are expected to cover costs of nurses’ salaries (and other services needed to care for residents) from existing funding sources, such as Medicare, Medicaid, or private pay payments. More information about the use of CMP funds can be found on the CMS CMP Reinvestment Program webpage.

We acknowledge that some may feel the funds from existing sources are not enough to cover all the costs needed for nurse staffing. However, there is a lack of transparency on how nursing homes manage and spend available funds. While there may be situations where the existing payments do present challenges to funding the costs for nurse staffing, there are other situations where the costs can be funded, but the organization has made a budgetary decision not to fund certain costs.

Q23. How many more nurses will this initiative lead to? How many have committed to come to nursing homes? Will it enable all nursing homes to comply with the new finalized requirements?

A23. We are in the very early stages of the campaign. We don’t have estimates at this time, but we will seek to obtain information like this through the research we conduct as we progress. While we don’t envision this program supplying nursing homes with all the staff they need to meet the finalized requirements, we do believe it will help facilities achieve the finalized standards in conjunction with other efforts.

LeadingAge will continue to engage with CMS to gather more details on these efforts and to offer suggestions for strategies and tools for the forthcoming campaign.