June 2021

Read the digital edition of the June 2021 print issue here. Select excerpts from this month’s magazine can also be found below.

The push to vaccinate staff took on added urgency in late May, as federal regulators issued a new rule requiring all long-term care providers to report COVID-19 vaccination data weekly. Rates for both...

Any upcoming cuts to Patient Driven Payment Model rates will not occur without providers’ voices being heard, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said as it solicited comments from stakeholders...

Deke Cateau, CEO, A.G. Rhodes

I am a fairly new nurse, and in school we were taught to call openings in the residents’ skin “pressure ulcers” and stage them accordingly. But other nurses are correcting me. They say there are...

How can we prevent fungal skin infections in hot weather?

The Program for Evaluating Payment Patterns Electronic Report (PEPPER) gathers data on billing patterns of U.S. SNFs. So, what has changed now that data is based on an entirely different payment model?

Can we be sued by resident families who say their loved ones contracted COVID-19 because we did not do enough to keep to keep them safe?

The COVID-19 pandemic has lowered our facility’s census by nearly 20%. What can the nursing department do to improve our census?

Long-term care providers have made great strides in reducing the use of psychotropic medication among residents. But once COVID-19 hit, some resorted to dispensing higher levels of these meds to address...