The Department of Health and Human Services recently released a new standard for staffing at nursing homes, spurred by the tragedies that played out in nursing homes around the country during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the next five years all nursing homes will have to have one registered nurse practitioner to every 44 residents. Most nursing homes already meet this requirement, with the average ratio of nurse practitioner to resident being 1:36. However, the rule also calls for one nurse aid for every 10 residents, which is more than the current average of 1:11. Considering everything in the new standard, around 75% of nursing homes will have to increase staffing, but most of them only by a modest amount.

This new standard is controversial on both sides, with the companies that own nursing homes claiming that these new positions will be impossible to fill in the current worker shortage, and experts in health care policy, and health care workers themselves, claiming that the new standard is woefully inadequate. A retired certified nurse assistant stated that when an aid has to take care of more than seven people “things aren’t done properly.” 

Staffing at nursing homes matters because staffing shortages can lead to medical malpractice. People in nursing homes are there specifically because they cannot take care of themselves. Without regular monitoring, residents can end up with festering bed sores, falling and breaking bones, or missing doses of life sustaining medications. Those kinds of issues can cause serious injury and death.

And this is not just an issue at nursing homes. We have already written a blog post on understaffing at hospitals, which is also a grave concern that can lead to medical malpractice, either in neglecting patients or by making errors caused by fatigue and rushed schedules. Healthcare facilities must be appropriately staffed.
Learn more about nursing malpractice here.