DES MOINES, Iowa — After months of debate, the Biden administration has now finalized plans for a new set of regulations in nursing homes.
The mandate requires that all nursing homes that receive Medicare and Medicaid services must have at least two to three registered nurses, 10 or more nurse aides and two nursing staffers. It marks the first-ever minimum staffing rule for U.S. nursing homes.
A recent study conducted by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services found that as staffing decreases in nursing homes, the level of quality decreases.
The topic hits home in Iowa for Diane Hathaway and Julie Ryan. Both women lost their mothers who lived in Iowa nursing homes, after expressing concern over their treatment.
“Before my mother passed, she was hospitalized twice for the same issues, which basically resulted from the lack of quality care," Hathaway told Local 5.
She says her mother, Evelyn Hayes, was severely dehydrated and malnourished, but those health issues were never properly communicated.
“I had to go to the hospital and get the hospital records because I was not getting full transparency from their nursing home," she said.
After Evelyn died, the Westview Acres Care Center in Leon received five federal regulatory violations.
For years, Hathaway and Ryan have been advocating for legislation that would allow nursing home residents to install cameras in their rooms. They started a group dedicated to the effort called Watchful Hearts, advocating for families concerned about staffing shortages who wished to monitor their loved ones.
“A lack of basic care contributed to her demise and eventual death," Hathaway said. "Cameras could have prevented what happened to my mother."
Similar legislation has been proposed in the past few legislative sessions but never made much headway.
Hathaway and Ryan are encouraged by the new staffing rule, but lobbyists for the nursing home industry in Iowa are not.
In a statement to Local 5, the Iowa Health Care Association said the mandate will “put more than 2,300 current Iowa nursing home residents at-risk of losing their care due to providers’ inability to meet the mandate.”
Gov. Kim Reynolds is also heavily opposed to the mandate. She joined other Republican governors in writing a letter to President Biden last November, stating the rule "treats this complex, deep-rooted problem as something to be solved with a simple wave of the bureaucratic wand."
The mandate will be phased out over the next three years, but rural Iowa communities will have up to five years, given that it may be harder to meet the staffing requirements in those areas.