SNF Staffing and Resident Care

Yesterday I blogged about a story in Kaiser Health News on the payroll reporting by SNFs that Medicare uses to determine staffing levels. KHN also has examined the data to see if there is a correlation between staffing and a resident's care. Mining A New Data Set To Pinpoint Critical Staffing Issues In Skilled Nursing Facilities notes that "[i]n April, Medicare began using [the payroll records, known as the payroll-based journal or PBJ] to rate staffing for more than 14,000 skilled nursing facilities (SNFs). The PBJ data gives a much better look at the how staffing relates to quality of care than the less precise — and too easy to inflate — staffing data Medicare had been using since 2008, which were based on two-week snapshots of staffing homes provided to inspectors. The data show staffing and occupancy on every day — an unprecedented degree of granularity that allows for new levels of inquiry."

The author offers

Low staffing is a root cause of many injuries in nursing homes. As I wrote in the article published in The New York Times based on the data: “When nursing homes are short of staff, nurses and aides scramble to deliver meals, ferry bedbound residents to the bathroom and answer calls for pain medication. Essential medical tasks such as repositioning a patient to avert bedsores can be overlooked when workers are overburdened, sometimes leading to avoidable hospitalizations.”

The author describes in detail the decisions that were made in crunching the data, using "two intersecting principles: to reflect residents’ lived experience as accurately as possible, and to be fair to the facilities. When in doubt, [the author] erred on the side of caution."

As an aside, the author notes the acronym for Payroll-Based Journal is PBJ!