Even before the coronavirus pandemic hit, Rhode Island’s nursing home workers say they didn’t have enough staff to care for their patients. Now, a coalition led by union organizers is calling on lawmakers to take action.
Wearing face masks and carrying signs, scores of nursing home workers protested outside the State House Tuesday afternoon, demanding that state lawmakers pass legislation to mandate minimum staffing levels and better pay for nursing home workers.
Victoria Mitchell, a nursing assistant at Hopkins Manor in North Providence, said that homes are so short-staffed that residents sometimes have to wait to get someone to help them use the bathroom. “If you go to the next room to help, they have to wait,’’ she said, “because there’s no staff.
The protest was led by Raise the Bar, which includes organizers from District 1199 New England of the Service Employees International Union.
Adenjesus Marin, a union organizer and coordinator of the Raise the Bar campaign, said low wages for caregivers created staffing shortages that have left Rhode Island’s nursing homes exceptionally vulnerable during this pandemic.
Marin and other coalition members are urging Rhode Island lawmakers to support two bills introduced in the General Assembly that would set minimum staffing levels in nursing homes. The bills — Senate bill (2519), introduced by state Sen. Maryellen Goodwin, and House bill 7624 introduced by state Rep. Scott Slater, both Democrats from Providence — would require a minimum daily after of 4.1 hours of direct nursing care per resident per day.
But some nursing home industry leaders oppose the effort, saying they would cost the industry more money without solving the more systemic problems. “Just putting out a ratio of 4.1 hours per day is essentially an unfunded mandate and doesn’t really help address the underlying issues,’’ said Jim Nyberg, executive director of LeadingAgeRI, which represents the state’s nonprofit nursing homes. A better way to promote increased staffing, he said, is by creating payment incentives through Medicaid, the federal insurance program that funds the majority of the state’s nursing home residents. The real problem, he said, is that Medicaid reimbursement rates are too low to cover the cost of care.
–Lynn Arditi, health reporter at The Public’s Radio, can be reached at larditi@thepublicsradio.org.
(A previous version of this story incorrectly reported the minimum staffing levels in the Senate bill.)
