August 17, 2023 Washington, DC — Ahead of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS) release of proposed staffing mandates for nursing home providers serving older adults and families across the country, Katie Smith Sloan, president and CEO of the leading association of nonprofit, mission-driven providers of aging services, including nursing homes, urged the Biden administration to take action to demonstrate its commitment to addressing the debilitating and pervasive workforce challenges plaguing aging services.
Reiterating LeadingAge’s long-standing, shared commitment to the Biden administration’s goal of improving quality of care in nursing homes, Sloan in an August 17 letter to the President wrote “…nursing homes [should] not be expected to shoulder the entire burden” of a national labor shortage and underscored the need for real solutions to increase potential employees and improve job quality. Mandating staffing requirements and “holding nursing homes to a standard that is impossible to meet” due to a lack of applicants–and then punishing providers for not meeting the requirements–will not achieve shared quality goals, Sloan emphasized.
Sloan in the letter requested that the President convene a roundtable of long-term care experts, providers, consumer representatives, labor economists, demographers and more to identify targeted steps the Administration can take to improve job quality and expand the pool of applicants for positions in nursing homes.
“It is critical that we make investments in our health care workforce, now and into the future, by building domestic and international pipelines of well-trained, professional caregivers,” Sloan wrote, adding that the President is “uniquely positioned to convene stakeholders to develop a collaborative and coordinated strategy to solve the nursing home staffing crisis.”
Some recommendations that might be considered by roundtable participants include:
- Offer incentives to expand training and advancement opportunities, including apprenticeship programs, to expand domestic pipelines.
- Make meaningful changes in immigration laws to make it easier for more health and long-term care workers to enter the United States and fill occupational shortages.
- Reduce regulatory burden and enhance flexibility to increase the number of staff, rather than punish and fine organizations for not having enough workers.
- Address and prohibit price gouging by staffing agencies that are taking advantage of health and long-term care providers who have no choice but to pay outrageously high prices for hourly help and who ultimately face closing their doors.
