Nursing home group: Biden's mandate could cause unprecedented workforce catastrophe

Care Providers Oklahoma Responds to President Joe Biden’s Nursing Home Vaccine Mandate New Requirements Could Cause Unprecedented Workforce Catastrophe OKLAHOMA CITY – Care Providers Oklahoma, the association representing Oklahoma’s skilled nursing professionals and residents, today released the following statement in response to President Joe Biden’s announcement that all skilled nursing staff must be vaccinated: “Oklahoma’s skilled nursing facilities, through a combination of successful vaccination campaigns and rigorous safety protocols, are now clearly the safest places in Oklahoma for vulnerable seniors when it comes to COVID protection. In the week of August 8-14, for example, the state’s Epidemiology Report indicates that skilled nursing and long-term care (LTC) settings had just 44 new COVID cases among residents across over 600 facilities, representing just .28% of the state’s total portion of new cases. That number has fallen precipitously since the last week of December 2020, when skilled nursing/LTC reported 443 new cases among residents, representing 2.4% of the state’s total caseload. As the Delta variant continues to explode across the state and country, Oklahoma nursing homes have largely kept COVID under control and offered the most successful protection to their residents available anywhere. “For that reason, it is extremely frustrating and disappointing to see the Biden Administration single out nursing homes as the only health care provider facing a federal vaccination mandate. More importantly, this mandate will transform the current workforce shortage in the skilled nursing profession (where administrators report upwards of 20% of jobs are going unfilled) into an untenable crisis that could result in facility closures and the complete abandonment of vulnerable seniors. Read more » by Jamison Faught - August 20, 2021 at 08:14AM

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