Latest Data on Nursing Home Staffing Levels and Poorly Performing Nursing Home

New York, NY, May 1, 2018 — Staffing is key to the quality of care provided by a nursing home. Though the critical need for sufficient staffing is widely acknowledged, too many nursing homes fail to have enough staff to ensure that residents receive decent care and are able to live with dignity. For many years, verifiable information on a nursing home’s staffing levels were unavailable to the public.

In November 2017, for the first time ever, the US Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) began publishing, on a quarterly basis, verifiable payroll-based records on the care staff who work in every nursing home in its database. Last week, CMS posted data for the last quarter of 2017. To help the public, residents, and their families access this important information in a user-friendly form, and learn about the nursing homes in their communities and states which the government has identified as among the most poorly performing, LTCCC is announcing today that we have posted the following resources on our website, www.nursinghome411.org:

I. Staffing Information for U.S. Nursing Homes: Our nursing home staffing page, http://nursinghome411.org/nursing-home-data-information/staffing/, provides tables for every state that include, for each facility in the state (that has reported), the facility’s resident population; its RN, LPN, and CNA care staffing levels; and the amount of care staff hours per resident day (HPRD) for both all care staff and for RNs specifically. To facilitate ease of use, the individual state files can be downloaded and are easily sortable. For example, a state file can be sorted to identify which facilities have the highest reported levels of RN care and which have the lowest. These 2017Q4 data are the most up-to-date, verifiable information available on nursing home care staff.

II. One-Star and Special Focus Facility Nursing Homes:

The fact that a nursing home is licensed does not necessarily mean that it is providing good care or decent living conditions. To help the public assess the quality of a nursing home’s care, CMS has developed a Five-Star Quality Rating System which ranks nursing homes from one (worst) to five (best) stars. Following is information that we have compiled for the public on nursing homes which CMS has identified as amongst the worst in each state.

• One-Star Nursing Homes – This file, available at http://nursinghome411.org/one-star-nursing-homes-april-2018/, provides a list of all U.S. nursing homes with a one-star rating on Nursing Home Compare as of April 2018 (data processed by CMS in March 2018). A one-star rating is the lowest possible rating in the federal Five-Star Quality Rating System. The file is searchable and sortable by state, facility name, location, and ratings for Health Inspections, Quality Measures, and Staffing.
• Poorly Performing Nursing Homes – In addition to the file with all one-star nursing homes in the US, we have compiled briefs for several states with information on facilities that have a very poor record of care, as identified by the US government through the Special Focus Facility Program and the Five-Star System. These states are: New York, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, California, Iowa, Connecticut, Florida, New Jersey, Texas, Maryland, Kansas, and Massachusetts.