Della Lilley visits with her mother, 89-year old Betty Whiteman at a nursing home during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Della Lilley visits with her mother, 89-year old Betty Whiteman at a nursing home during the COVID-19 pandemic. / Getty Images

In his State of the Union address, President Joe Biden made a promise to "protect seniors' lives." And he's following through on that promise with his latest push to ensure that nursing homes, serving 1.2 million seniors, are sufficiently staffed around the clock.

On Sept. 1, the Biden administration issued a proposal to establish comprehensive staffing requirements for nursing homes across the country. The President, alongside the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), through the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), has proposed a minimum nursing staff standard for facilities participating in Medicare and Medicaid.

Since the start of the pandemic, more than 200,000 residents and staff in long-term care facilities have died because of COVID-19.

"That's unacceptable," Xavier Becerra, the secretary of HHS, told Morning Edition.

Roughly three quarters of long-term care facilities would have to hire additional staff to meet the administration's requirements, CMS estimates.

"It's a big change in the sense that the industry hasn't had to follow particular standards," Becerra said. "And it's been the wild, wild west when it comes to quality and accountability at nursing homes throughout the country. What we're simply saying is we don't want [the] wild, wild west when we send our loved ones."

Nursing is inevitably a demanding job, and it has been widely regarded as one of the most stressful occupations, according to the journal Acta Biomedica. The profession is associated with high levels of staff turnover, absenteeism and levels of burnout.

In an attempt to improve nurse retention rates and attract more people to the industry, CMS would work with private sector partners, investing over $75 million in financial incentives, such as tuition reimbursement.

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Corrections

In an earlier description for this story, the name of the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services was misspelled. He is Xavier Becerra, not Javier Becerra.

A previous version of this story incorrectly attributed a quote about "nursing being a demanding job" to the National Library of Medicine. In fact, that quote came from the journal Acta Biomedica.