Long-term Care
Topic Outline
Other Long-Term Care Pages
- LTC Facilities
- Home Care
- Home Health
- Hospice
Links
- Chapter 9 – Long-Term Care (Alliance for Health Reform)
- Long-Term Care (Health Affairs topic page)
- Home Care (Health Affairs topic page)
- Nursing Home Compare (U.S. DHHS). This tool has detailed information about every Medicare and Medicaid-certified nursing home in the country.
- National Survey of Residential Care Facilities: Sample Frame Construction and Benchmarking Report (RTI) provides a wealth of material about number and characteristics of residential care facilities other than nursing homes.
Analysis
- Hiring a new nursing aide typically costs nursing homes $4,000 apiece, including recruitment and administrative expenses.
- Nursing aides have a high injury rate (nonfatal injuries are measured based on those severe enough to cause a worker to lose days of work, transfers to a different job or restrictions on work: this is known as the DART rate). Privately-owned nursing homes had a combined DART rate of 5.3 per 100 full-time workers, which is nearly triple that of all occupations (and more than double that in construction, 2.1).
- There is no federal standard for nursing-aide staffing; only two-thirds of states set minimum levels. On average, U.S. nursing homes have one aide on duty per 10 residents, but UCSF professor Charlene Harrington thinks this ratio should be 1 per 7 for both day and evening shifts.