The Biden administration finalized on Monday the first-ever minimum staffing rule at nursing homes, Vice President Kamala Harris announced.
The controversial mandate requires that all nursing homes that receive Medicare and Medicaid funding provide a total of at least 3.48 hours of nursing care per resident per day, including defined periods from registered nurses and from nurse aides. That means a facility with 100 residents would need at least two or three registered nurses and at least 10 or 11 nurse aides, as well as two additional nurse staff, who could be registered nurses, licensed professional nurses or nurse aides, per shift, according to a White House fact sheet.
Plus, nursing homes must have a registered nurse onsite at all times. The mandate will be phased in, with rural communities having longer timeframes, and temporary exemptions will be available for facilities in areas with workforce shortages that demonstrate a good faith effort to hire.
The rule, which was first proposed in September and initially called for at least three hours of daily nursing care per resident, is aimed at addressing nursing homes that are chronically understaffed, which can lead to sub-standard or unsafe care, the White House said.
That makes me think of my own grandfather (in a good way) I will never claim that he was the most forward-thinking, tolerant, or politically correct person out there, there were a few stereotypes and bits out outdated terminology he never quite shook (for example, the term “colored” never quite left his vocabulary, and he had a tiny bit of lingering distrust of the Japanese having served in the Pacific during WWII)
But for a man who grew up in the time he did, he wasn’t half-bad.
He was never someone who was above holding a a grudge, and he’d gladly tell anyone who would listen who he didn’t like and why. His reasons weren’t always good, he got mad at people over a lot of petty bullshit, but I never heard him disparage someone because of their race. He ended up in a nursing home where a lot of the staff was black, and we never heard a peep from him about their race, he found plenty of other things to complain about, but there was no racial bias to it, he complained about the white employees as much or more than the black ones.
Little bit of fun family history with him, for most of his life he worked as a bus driver. Buses in our part of the country were racially integrated from pretty early on so that was never something he dealt with directly, but he did drive his bus at the same time that bus boycotts and such would have been happening in other parts of the country. He never told us this story himself, we heard it from some other older locals who remembered him driving the bus. There was one particular bus stop that was near a business that employed a lot of black women, and many of them took the bus. The bus would come at around the same time the business closed for the night, so they didn’t have much time to get to the stop before the bus came. A lot of other drivers wouldn’t wait for them, but my grandfather always did, and decades later many of them still remembered him for that.