Nursing home staff turnover rates and weekend staffing levels are now being incorporated into providers’ Five-Star Ratings.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services on Thursday announced that Care Compare’s July 2022 refresh includes the revision into the methodology for calculating staffing star ratings. It also is being less generous with star upgrades for some facilities.
CMS first announced in January that it would begin posting facility turnover and weekends staffing data to Care Compare, and that the information would be included into the Five-Star rating system by July.
The new rating is based on six separate staffing measures and assigns points based on how well providers perform on each. The points are then summed up and the total staffing score is compared to the staffing rating point threshold to assign a rating between 1 and 5 stars.
New staffing measures include:
- Total nurse staffing hours per resident per day weekends;
- Total nurse staff turnover within a given year;
- Registered nurse turnover within a given year; and
- Number of administrators who have left the nursing home within a given year.
Those are in addition to the existing measures of registered nurse and total nurse hours per resident day.
“Additionally, to emphasize the importance of staffing, we will no longer add one star to the overall rating of nursing homes that have a four-star staffing rating,” CMS explained. “Rather, only nursing homes with a five-star staffing rating will be rewarded with an increase in their overall star rating.”
