Last week, CMA released an Alert reporting on four recent studies that found a positive correlation between nurse staffing levels and improved nursing home performance in containing COVID-19 cases and deaths. Nursing homes in every state, along with Washington, DC, however, are informing CMS in parallel that they have a shortage of those valuable nurse resources.[1]
According to the latest release of CMS’s COVID-19 Nursing Home Data set, 15.7% of all nursing homes nationwide reported a nurse staff shortage.[2] The percentage of state-level nurse staff shortages ranged from 29.7% (Alabama) to 1% (California). Fourteen states reported that between 20.1%-29.7% of their nursing home facilities were suffering from nursing staff shortages, potentially negatively impacting their ability to contend with a still-growing pandemic.
Furthermore, 234 nursing homes across 40 states in the nation reported a staff shortage across all available categories (nursing, clinical, aides, and other). Of those states, Texas has the greatest number of nursing homes reporting across the board staff shortages (41 facilities), while Ohio came in second with 21 facilities. According to CMS, Texas falls within the highest bracket of total resident cases by state with over 13,300 cases.
[1] Drawn from the CMS COVID-19 Nursing Home Data set (https://data.cms.gov/stories/s/COVID-19-Nursing-Home-Data/bkwz-xpvg/) ending the week of August 2, 2020. 2,237 out of 14,256 nursing homes reported nurse staff shortages from July 27 – August 2, 2020.
[2] The COVID-19 Nursing Home Data set filtered to remove nursing homes surveys that did not pass the CMS quality assurance check