(NEWSnet/AP) – The federal government is for the first time requiring nursing homes to have minimum staffing levels, a follow up from complaints and problems noted during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Vice President Kamala Harris announced the final rules on Monday before a trip to La Crosse, Wisconsin, where she will talk to nursing home care employees about their work. While in Wisconsin, Harris also will participate in a campaign event focused on abortion rights.

President Joe Biden announced his plan to set nursing home staffing levels in his 2022 State of the Union address, but his administration took longer than expected to work to on specifics as health care worker shortages continue to impact industry. About 1.2 million older and disabled people reside in nursing homes.

Until now, the law only required that nursing homes have “sufficient” staffing, leaving it up to states for interpretation.

Allies of older adults have sought more specific details for decades, but the updates will most certainly see criticism from the nursing home industry. They include:

  • A minimum number of hours that staff members spend with residents.
  • A nurse must be available around the clock at the facilities.
  • 80% of Medicaid payments for home care providers must go to workers’ wages.
  • Staffing equivalent to 3.48 hours per resident per day, just over half an hour of it coming from registered nurses.

The government said under the new standards, a facility with 100 residents would need two or three registered nurses and 10 or 11 nurse aides, as well as two additional nurse staff per shift.

The average U.S. nursing home already has overall caregiver staffing of about 3.6 hours per resident per day, including RN staffing just above the half-hour mark; but the government said a majority of the country’s roughly 15,000 nursing homes would have to add staff under the new regulation.

The new thresholds are still lower than those that had long been eyed by advocates after a landmark 2001 study funded by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, recommended an average of 4.1 hours of nursing care per resident daily.

When the rules were first proposed last year, the American Health Care Association, which lobbies for care facilities, rejected the changes. The association’s president, Mark Parkinson, a former governor of Kansas, called the rules “unfathomable,” saying he was hoping to convince the administration to never finalize the rule.

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