May 29, 2025
The Consumer Voice
May 29, 2025, 2:00 p.m.,
Since the creation of a minimum staffing standard was announced in 2022, there has been significant focus on what a staffing standard should look like. In Consumer Voice's comments submitted in support of the staffing rule, we recommended a staffing standard that considered the needs (acuity) of each resident. Rather than one standard, there should be multiple standards centered on residents' conditions and care needs. One suggested model was based on a groundbreaking paper from 2020, Appropriate Nurse Staffing Levels for U.S. Nursing Homes, in which staffing levels were assigned based on a variety of data sources. In 2024, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) began publishing additional data on each nursing home's average Case Mix Index for all its residents. This makes assigning staffing levels to the care needs of residents simpler. A new paper, Nursing Home Guide to Adjusting Nurse Staffing for Resident Case-Mix , describes how the staffing levels necessary to meet the care needs of residents in a particular facility can be determined by using the Case Mix Index. The needs-based model serves not only to guide nursing homes in determining their staffing needs, but also provides nursing home residents, families, and other consumers with a metric by which to measure whether a nursing home is meeting the care needs of each resident. Join Consumer Voice for a webinar featuring two authors of the new paper, Dr. Charlene Harrington and Richard Mollot, who will walk us through their paper, describe the new staffing measure, and provide information on how to access this critical data.
Zoom Staffing to Acuity: A Webinar on How Nursing Homes Can Meet the Staffing Needs of All Residents
