(Pa) Nursing homes would provide more direct care time to residents under proposed Pa. rule

Gov Wolf on Wednesday released a long-awaited update to Pennsylvania’s decades-old nursing home regulations, acknowledging it must raise low quality care requirements experts have called dangerous. The state currently requires nursing homes to provide residents with only 2.7 hours of direct care each day, despite federal recommendations that facilities should provide at least 4.1 hours of care daily.

A 2020 investigation by ‘Spotlight PA’ found just a quarter of the state’s more than 670 licensed facilities met that higher benchmark, and that the lower standards were exacerbated by the pandemic, which has killed at least 13,374 people inside Pennsylvania’s nursing and personal care homes.

Changing the patient to staff ratio is the first proposal in what the department says will be a series of five packages to update the state’s nursing home regulations. The Pennsylvania Health Care Association, which represents more than 400 long-term care facilities, immediately pushed back, calling the proposal “out of touch,” in part because facilities have long struggled with staffing shortages.

According to the association, they will need to hire an additional 7,000 direct care workers in order to meet the new 4.1 hour staffing requirement, said the group’s president and CEO, Zach Shamberg said in a statement.

https://triblive.com/news/pennsylvania/nursing-homes-would-provide-more-direct-care-to-residents-under-proposed-pa-rule/