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.