In the early days of the pandemic, to help nursing homes function under the virus’s onslaught, the federal government relaxed training requirements. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services instituted a national policy saying nursing homes needn’t follow regulations requiring nurse aides to undergo at least 75 hours of state-approved training. Normally, a nursing home couldn’t employ aides for more than four months unless they met those requirements.
Adequate training of aides is crucial so “they know what they’re doing before they provide care, for their own good as well as for the residents,” said Toby Edelman, a senior policy attorney for the Center for Medicare Advocacy.finding that roughly 4 in 5 facilities were dealing with moderate to high levels of staff shortages.A looming rollback of broader access to buprenorphine, an important medication for people in recovery from opioid addiction, is alarming patients and doctors.
For example, CMS allowed hospitals to make broader use of nurse practitioners and physician assistants when caring for Medicare patients. And new physicians not yet credentialed to work at a particular hospital — for example, because governing bodies lacked time to conduct their reviews — could nonetheless practice there.
Public health departments are still getting their arms around the scope of the changes, said Janet Hamilton, executive director of the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists.
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