Members of Congress call on CMS to collaborate in addressing nursing home workforce challenges
A bipartisan group of members of the House of Representatives is looking to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to work with them to resolve workforce shortages experienced by nursing homes across the country.
In a Sept. 9 letter to CMS Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, 14 lawmakers asked for the agency’s support of H.R. 7744, the Building America’s Healthcare Workforce Act.
The representatives noted that according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the United States has lost almost 240,000 nursing home jobs since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Projections also show that the United States could see 400 more skilled nursing facility closures in 2022 alone,” they wrote.
The Building America’s Health Care Workforce Act was introduced in May by U.S. Reps. Madeleine Dean (D-PA), Brett Guthrie (R-KY) and David McKinley (R-WV) and would extend temporary pandemic-era allowances in an effort to build up the nursing home workforce. In addition to allowing temporary nurse aides who had worked in nursing homes for 24 months to fulfill training and testing requirements to become certified nursing assistants, the bill also would enable them to apply their on-the-job experience and training toward the 75-hour federal training requirement to become certified.
Read the full story from McKnight’s here.
