Please Cosponsor Ensuring Seniors’ Access to Quality Care Act (S. 4381)

July 14, 2022

Dear Senator Richard Blumenthal and Senator Chris Murphy,

My name is David V. Hunter, and I am the President & CEO of The Mary Wade Home and Chatham Place at Mary Wade, located in the Fair Haven Neighborhood of New Haven. We are a venerable nonprofit senior living community, founded on this same site in 1866, originally to assist women and children who we left destitute following the Civil War. During the past 156 years, we have transformed into a senior living community that provides a full spectrum of services and programs that includes, both short term and long term skilled nursing care, assisted living and memory care, residential care, adult day medical model care, 55+ apartment community, community transportation, outpatient rehabilitation and primary care. Needless to say, virtually all of our programs require front line staff to perform all of these programs and services. 

I ask you to support legislation that will help strengthen our aging services workforce. Under current regulations, nursing homes assessed civil monetary penalties (CMPs) above $10,000 automatically lose their authority to train Certified Nursing Assistants (CNAs)for a full two years. The suspension is required even if the fines are unrelated to the quality of care provided to residents or are caused by situations outside of a nursing home's control. Furthermore, CNAs are an integral part of the long-term care workforce; this two-year training lockout exacerbates current staffing challenges created by the country's ongoing workforce in long-term care.

U.S. Senators Mark R. Warner (D-VA) and Tim Scott (R-SC) introduced S.4381, the Ensuring Seniors' Access to Quality Care Act in June, which would modify the "CNA training lockout" that's mandated by current regulation and contributes to the long-term care staffing crisis across the country.

The nation will need to fill 8.2 million direct care jobs in the long-term care sector between 2018 and 2028 as existing workers leave the field or exit the labor force altogether, according to researchers at PHI. Nursing homes across the country have been forced to limit admissions of new short- and long-term residents-or to close entirely-because there are not enough direct caregiving professionals to provide quality care.

The Ensuring Seniors' Access to Quality Care Act would allow nursing homes to reinstate their training programs, provided that any relevant deficiencies cited in the survey are corrected; the deficiencies did not result in immediate risk to resident safety or arise as a result of resident harm from abuse or neglect; and the nursing home has not received a repeat deficiency related to resident harm in the past two years. This bill would also provide nursing home operators with access to the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB) - a national criminal background check system - to give employers a greater ability to screen potential candidates.

CNAs provide essential care in nursing homes nationwide. Strong workforce training programs are critical to provide the quality care older adults deserve and to build our country's long-term care employee pipeline. Please cosponsor S. 4381, the Ensuring Seniors' Access to Quality Care Act, and help aging services providers gain access to the workers they need to care for older adults.

Thank you.

David V. Hunter, President & CEO