News – Without Judgement!
August 26, 2021
We just received notice from ANCOR Staff that during a recent meeting CMS staff made it clear that they do not intend to extend the mandate for vaccination of staff beyond nursing homes. There had been discussion that ICF/IIDs could be included in the federal mandate, but CMS understands the severity of the workforce shortages in both ICFs and HCBS and the potential for a vaccine mandate to make the situation far worse!
Also, we met yesterday with Commissioner Land and DBHDS staff to discuss the devastating fallout from the decision to shut down admissions at the State Facilities. See our recent News Post. The take-aways were:
- Currently there are 255 or 19% of the state beds “off-line.”
- Some facilities are able to admit onto staffed beds if the are able to discharge someone (a 1:1 exchange).
- There is a version of a state-wide “waiting list,” but the process for accessing/using the list is unclear.
- Our requests for data related to the criterion used to close admissions or the specifics of what it will take to reopen were not answered, the explanation was that while there were also closures in the community, those providers are not sharing their data. We avoided mentioning that sine the community providers were licensed her staff had every opportunity to gather that data!
- There was agreement to meet fairly regularly and the stakeholder group will continue to collaborate!
Lastly we are still working on:
- Some resolution on the supervisor and staff training issues
- Modification of the Guidance on “Late Reporting” which has been in the works (we think) for weeks!
- Clarification on the payment methodology for the 12.5% bump for nearly all of the services in our collective portfolios