Member Article

Key Points

• As of January 2022, CMS is posting each skilled nursing home's weekend staffing levels and staff turnover rates on its public-facing Care Compare website.
• This information will be used in the Nursing Home Five Star Quality Rating System and will affect facilities' Five Star ratings starting in July 2022.
• Employee identifiers are used to calculate each facility's staff turnover measures by identifying when each employee starts and stops working at a facility so make sure these are up to date.

On January 7, 2022, CMS announced it would begin posting weekend staffing levels and staff turnover rates for skilled nursing facilities throughout the country. (CMS memo available here). This information is now appearing on CMS's Care Compare website and remain publicly available for approximately three years.

Weekend Nurse Staffing Levels

CMS began posting data on the level of weekend RN and total nurse (e.g. RN, licensed practical nurse (LPN), certified nurse aide (CNA)) staffing for all nursing homes. Staffing levels will be reported in terms of average number of RN and total nurse hours worked per resident per day on weekends.

To encourage weekend nurse staffing, CMS will also add the measure of total nurse staffing on weekends to the staffing rating domain of the Nursing Home Five Star Quality Rating System in July 2022 (Technical Users' Guide available here).

Nursing Home Staff Turnover

CMS recognizes that the association between staff turnover and quality is important and valuable to consumers. In addition to weekend nurse staffing levels, CMS is now posting the following measures of staff turnover and will include the following measures in the staffing domain of the Nursing Home Five Star Quality Rating System in July 2022:

• % of RN staff that left the facility over the last year
• % of total nurse staff that have left the facility over the last year
• # of administrators that have left the facility over the last year

Reminder to Link Employee Identifiers

If there are changes to your payroll or timekeeping system, it may be necessary to also update your employee identifiers. Employee identifiers are used to calculate each facility's staff turnover measures by identifying when each employee starts and stops working at a facility. If there is a change in an employee identifier, CMS interprets this as if the employee stopped working at the facility. When there is a change in employee identifier, the old identifier and the new identifier need to be linked to ensure that turnover rates are not artificially increased.