About Nursing Home Staffing
The following types of staff are included in the nursing home staffing information that is collected by Centers of Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) and is one of the 6 criteria to rate the quality of nursing homes on this website-nursinghomenavigator.com:
- Registered Nurse (RN)
- Licensed Practical Nurse (LPN)
- Licensed Vocational Nurse (LVN)
- Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA)
Each nursing home reports its staffing hours to its state survey agency. These staffing hours are from a two-week period just before the state inspection. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) gets nursing home staffing data from the states.
CMS converts the staffing hours reported by the nursing home into a measure that shows the number of staff hours per resident per day. The staffing hours per resident per day are reported by type of staff, and all staff combined as a total.
Staffing hours per resident per day is the average amount of hours worked divided by the total number of residents. It doesn't necessarily show the number of nursing staff present at any given time, or reflect the amount of care given to any one resident.
Why is this staffing hours per resident day important?
Federal law requires all nursing homes to provide enough staff to adequately care for residents. However, there is no current federal standard for the best nursing home staffing levels. The nursing home must have at least one RN for at least 8 straight hours a day, 7 days a week, and either an RN or LPN/LVN on duty 24 hours per day. Certain states may have additional staffing requirements. CNAs provide 90% of the personal care to nursing home residents twenty four hours per day, seven days a week. A good benchmark for nurse staffing is 1 hour or greater per resident per day and for CNA staffing 2.5 hours or greater per resident per day.
Important Caution: Staffing numbers are based on information reported by the nursing home. They represent staffing levels for a two-week period prior to the time of the state inspection. CMS checks the data for unusual reporting issues, like obvious data entry error, and asks states to follow up with nursing homes in those cases. However, currently there is no system to fully verify the accuracy of the staffing data that nursing homes report. Because of this limitation and because staffing levels may have changes since the last inspection, you should be cautious when interpreting the data.