Professor Nina Kohn, along with Charlene Harrington, professor emeritus at the University of California San Francisco’s School of Nursing, and Lori Smetanka, executive director of the National Consumer Voice for Quality Long-Term Care, have contributed the article “Biden’s nursing home staffing proposal is dangerously inadequate” in The Hill.
In the article, the authors outline dangerous gaps in the proposed nursing home staffing levels recently made by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). They note that “CMS has proposed that nursing homes only be required to provide three hours of staff time per resident per day. That’s far less than what many states with state-specific minimum staffing standards require. It’s only 73 percent of the 4.1 hours per day that a rigorous CMS study found is necessary to avoid neglect.”