At a June 4 press event in Washington, DC, LeadingAge President and CEO Katie Smith Sloan joined long-term care associations and nursing home providers to explain why the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS) final nursing home staffing rule must not be implemented and policymakers must shift focus to support policies that will ensure funding and support for the long-term care workforce. Speaking alongside leaders from the American Health Care Association (AHCA), the National Rural Health Association, National Association of State Veterans Homes, and providers including Good Samaritan Society, Ms. Sloan emphasized the commitment of LeadingAge’s nonprofit and mission driven provider members—many of whom have served their communities for decades and even more than a century— to ensure quality care in nursing homes:
“We know, deeply, the essence of caregiving. We fully share the Biden Administration’s goal. At the same time, we have made clear that our current infrastructure of long-term care cannot sustain staffing mandates until they are supported by adequate funding and available staff,” Ms. Sloan said.
Ms. Sloan also outlined a range of needed policy actions to address the long-term care sector’s workforce issues, including: aligning reimbursement to the actual cost of care, including paying staff a living wage; supporting education and training: these are highly specialized jobs that need to be supported through ongoing education and training, including aligning federal and state training requirements and lifting limits on clinical training sites; fixing our immigration system to allow more foreign-born workers to come to the United States.
Read LeadingAge’s June 4 press release here.
