(We Chinese in America Media Editor Tang Zhao, January 28, 2022) The Red and Blue Card website publishes nursing home staff turnover and weekend nurse duty details to allow the public to compare the quality of nursing homes. The picture shows an 85-year-old resident in a nursing home in Florida. (Getty Images)

The Biden administration launched a new service measure for the federal health insurance plan (Medicare) on the 26th. It will publish the details of the staff turnover rate and weekend nurse duty in the nursing home on the "Care Compare" page of the federal health insurance website, which is convenient for consumers to compare the quality of care in nursing homes.

After the outbreak of a new round of the epidemic, although the nursing home has strengthened vaccination, the number of infections and deaths is still increasing, and the quality of the staff is very important to the service quality and safety of the nursing home.

If consumers want to get information about nursing homes, they can log in to the Care Compare website and search for any nursing home, and then click on the "View Staffing Information" page to know the details of nursing staff on weekends as well as nurses and management staff turnover.

The Centers for Medicaid and Medicaid Services (CMS) said they did a comparative study of employee turnover and service quality and found that if employee turnover decreased, the overall quality of care in nursing homes improved. A measure of low nurse turnover is the proportion of nursing staff who stop working within a year. Starting this summer, CMS will use information such as employee turnover to evaluate the service quality of nursing homes, which will be reflected in the form of five stars.

Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, director of CMS, said: "The importance of nursing home staff has become increasingly prominent during the epidemic, and we hope that our announcement will help improve the quality of service. People living in nursing homes and their families can also find valuable information from our website.”

The success of nursing homes depends on the quality of service, and CMS said that if the turnover rate of nursing staff is low, it will deepen the familiarity with residents of the nursing home, to detect any signs that patients may develop more quickly.

CMS said that the management turnover rate provided by the website can reflect the stability, leadership, and daily operation of the nursing home, and plays an important role in ensuring the quality of services.

CMS said the information on nursing and management staff posted online will not increase the paperwork workload for nursing homes because it is information that has been reported to the government but has not been released to the public in the past.

(Source: Compiled from Online Information)