The devastating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on nursing home residents and staff has renewed attention to the long-standing weaknesses that impede the provision of high-quality nursing home care. In this context, with support from a coalition of sponsors, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine formed the Committee on the Quality of Care in Nursing Homes to examine how the United States delivers, finances, regulates, and measures the quality of nursing home care. The committee’s investigation led to several key conclusions about the current state of nursing home care, which does not align with the committee’s vision of high-quality nursing home care.

1. The way in which the United States finances, delivers, and regulates care in nursing home settings is ineffective, inefficient, fragmented, and unsustainable.
2. Immediate action to initiate fundamental change is necessary.
3. Federal and state governments, nursing homes, providers, payers, researchers, and others need to make clear a shared commitment to the care of nursing home residents.
4. Extreme care needs to be taken to ensure that quality improvement initiatives are implemented using strategies that do not exacerbate disparities in resources, quality of care, or resident outcomes.
5. High-quality research is needed to advance the quality of care in nursing homes.
6. The nursing home sector has suffered for many decades from underinvestment in ensuring the quality of care in nursing homes and a lack of accountability in how resources are allocated.
7. All relevant federal agencies need to have authority and resources from the U.S. Congress to implement the recommendations of this report.

The four-page Consensus Study Report – HIGHLIGHTS is available here.  The recommendations from the committee are available here.

Questions?

Contact:

Laura Hofmann, MSN, RN – Director of Clinical and Nursing Facility Regulatory Services
c: 425-231-4804