I've written numerous times about staffing issues at Gracedale, Northampton County's nursing home. It is relying heavily on outside agencies to provide nursing care. An operational assessment recently revealed that these nurses are paid 41% more than county employees. But Gracedale is far from alone. According to Lehigh Valley News, Lehigh County nursing home Cedarbrook is contracting out one-third of its nursing care to these outside agencies.
Cedarbrook Administrator Jason Cumello told Lehigh County Comm'rs that these outside nurses just want cash and do not really care as much about benefits like a pension or healthcare.
Cedarbrook and Gracedale are by no means outliers. Cumello also said that there is a 130,000-nursing home worker shortage nationwide. AARP calls it a staffing apocalypse.
In the midst of these vacancies, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have incongruously decided to increase the amount of direct nursing care required to 3.48 hours per resident per day. In March, Exec Lamont McClure told me that Gracedale was providing 3.7 hours of nursing care per day per person.
30 comments:
Either staff it or sell it. Job seekers today don't even know what a pension is. Put money in their pockets. Sad that people who work for the county can't afford to live in the county. Take the seventy million for the needless McClure ego monument health center and put it towards wages. That is what employees really want and need.
Gracedale is in as good a shape as it can possibly be for a Long Term Care facility in a post-Covid world.
Gracedale is holding its own. One of the worst aspects of the Vargo-Heffner/Brown Powering Sharing Agreement is that the Republicans ran on destroying Gracedale and she’s been helping them.
It will be up to the Federal and State governments to determine whether counties stay in the nursing home business.
County Council’s excellent, in-depth report by Affinity demonstrated that Gracedale is a mammoth, remarkably well-run home considering its size and complexity. When you consider the unfathomable difficulties of running a nursing home in a global pandemic that hit Long Term Care Facilities the hardest, the Affinity report was a triumph for Northampton County.
Gracedale management is under tremendous pressure to get the home to at least 3 Stars by Summer.
Gracedale has never recovered from the gutting of 300 positions by Executive Brown. When Covid hit, it was already over.
Gracedale is being privatized by the health care market. It would be closed right now without private contractor labor. The tide toward privatization cannot be stemmed. Our county is doing it as we speak. They're letting the market act and they're not getting dragged like Stoffa and Angle for privatizing it incrementally. Smart.
Tell the truth. They were open positions with no chance of filling
With an alleged 3.7 staffing they should be four stars at least
Eliminate pension benefits for new hires if they want the money now
We’ll all be dead before the pension fund runs out
Reality is that all these senior facilities and hospitals too are reliant on travel staff. Lehigh mentions the truth from their meeting that the worker shortage impacts access to the healthcare system and now the government increases the requirements during a shortage. I think most of these places in the region and especially the two county facilities are just trying to the best they can. It kind of is what it is. You wonder why the two countries don’t try to work together for their own agency.
With an alleged 3.7 staffing they should be four stars at least
CMS has frozen its start rating until July.
John Brown wants Gracedale to fail. The question is will Lori be the heroine of his story or will she thwart him.
Hope they get the four then,!
One of the things that was clear from the tremendous Affinity report ordered and paid for by County Council, is that Premier and John Brown were starving Gracedale of employees.
Public nursing homes are brutal businesses. Cedarbrook is trying desperately to modernize, but they expansion project might be dead in the water and left for the next Exec to deal with.
"Exec Lamont McClure told me that Gracedale was providing 3.7 hours of nursing care per day per person."
According to the last Department of Health inspection from March, Gracedale was at 3.35 hours and Cedarbrook at 3.76. Due to financial losses, Monroe County is set to sell their home this year which will leave just 11 PA counties in the nursing home business. It's a brutal business because the state Medicaid reimbursement rate hasn't kept up with Bidenflation. Without ARPA funds, the county contribution would be significant.
Gracedale is being incrementally privatized by Lamont, who is a wiley pol for getting it done while his reliable simpleton sheep blame everyone else. It's Brown's fault! LVH is a Trump mole! Lol. You can't thwart market economics. Stoffa and Angle were winning all along because they knew the inescapable math.
You flip flop constantly on Gracedale, its admin and your take on staffing demands from CMS. 2 stars are never clerical
errors but are what you earn by what you submit and present. Who is in charge these days, Jen Stewart King? Who is in charge of Nursing since Dawn was finally fired? Truly a hot mess there. Cedarbrook may have its issues but they are four not two
stars.
I don't hear much of anything coming out of Lehigh County about their nursing home before last week. You almost forget they have one at times since we are always in the news good or bad and before last week I had not heard a single story about them since covid. There was more information in that short presentation talked about in that new story you link than what I hear coming from Gracedale. They are rated highly and yet instead of patting themselves on their own backs they took more time congratulating the performance of Cedarbrook workers. Here we bea Gracedale workers for sport. They noted the difficulties of running their county home and even gave a timeline of how hard it has been since covid first hit with actually citing material, and covid hit them as hard as it hit gracedale. There is obviously a functional collaborative relationship with their board vs council. There were on wfmz last week like Lamont was and yet they are defending nursing homes on tv and Lamont is fighting the state. I am sure Gracedale is a good home like Lehigh, but the difference between the two counties is tact.
Seriously, if any more county homes are removed from the books, the IGT funding will drop signicantly and the county will need to come up with about 2 million per year to keep it
In the black….or raise taxes
9:52, It hasn't worked out that way. As the number of public nursing homes has decreased, the IGT has actually gone up.
"According to the last Department of Health inspection from March, Gracedale was at 3.35 hours and Cedarbrook at 3.76."
The most recent DOH inspection online is dated 6/8/03, and that does not measure staffing. I do not know where you got this information. https://www.medicare.gov/care-compare/inspections/pdf/nursing-home/395476/health/standard?date=2023-06-08
Boy, you sound like a shill for someone. Not sure who, but you know how to lay it on thick.
What gives with the Cedarbrook expansion ? Is the Lehigh County stiffing its contractors ?
While this is a political blog, there is a strong moral imperative to County homes. These homes, along with some of the religious organizations like Phoebe and Holy Family Manor (sadly, no longer Kirkland) are operations that look to provide quality care while breaking even. It cannot be emphasized enough that for-profit nursing homes do not exist to take care of the frailest amongst us. They exist for the profit motive. Having a county home is the absolute safety net for these patients that nursing home corporations, now commonly owned by private equity, would not touch by a mile. Gracedale may not have espresso machines and crystal chandeliers, but it has a workforce with pride, strong leadership, and never makes a decision that is driven by profit over people. This is not the case with 95% of nursing homes out there and I am proud our county provides this level of care for our people.
I heard sinkhole
Have you made an inquiry to either county if there is a plan to provide a pension and health benefits-free all dollars pay plan? I am not sure we believed Jennifer in the past regarding this subject but now Cedarbrook said the same thing regarding pay. They both cannot be wrong on this. It seems to me it would be an easy fix to change pay plans and would probably save taxpayer money not funding a runaway pension plans that the employees reportedly don’t even want anymore. It may not be that easy in our government requirements though. Why not interview both county homes on the subject? Both run huge senior homes. We can probably learn a lot more getting info from the source.
I have made no inquiry. That strikes me as a matter to be decided by the unions. If a majority wants no benefits, I'm sure that can be arranged when the next contract comes up. I'm not sure about public pensions.
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