Vice President Kamala Harris announced on Monday that the Biden administration has finalized the first-ever minimum staffing requirements for nursing homes.
The move comes after the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw advocates for the elderly reporting poor living conditions for residents in which they’d go hours without meals and water and were not kept properly clean. The pandemic claimed the lives of more than 167,000 nursing home residents, and afterward, there was a dramatic drop in staffing.
The rule will require all Medicaid- and Medicare-funded facilities to provide a total of at least 3.48 hours of care per resident per day. This means that a facility with 100 residents would need at least two or three registered nurses, 10 or 11 aides, …