Increasing the availability of immigrant workers, in addition to solving an industry-wide staffing shortage, could improve the quality of care in nursing homes, Delia Furtado, Ph.D., an associate professor of economics at the University of Connecticut, said Tuesday during a presentation sponsored by the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution.
Furtado cited the recent report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine that described skilled nursing facility care as “ineffective, inefficient, inequitable, fragmented and unsustainable.” During the pandemic, many, if not most, nursing homes experienced staffing shortages, she said.
Furtado said that she and Francesc Ortega, Ph.D., an economics professor at Queens College, City University of New York, performed an analysis that found that increasing immigration quotas would help the long-term care industry with staffing deficits.
“Where there is more abundant immigrant labor, nursing homes are slightly better able to provide quality care,” she said.
“[A] decrease in the cost of providing quality care only translates into higher quality care in competitive environments,” Furtado and Ortega wrote. “This finding is important not only for thinking about immigration policy but also for evaluating the likely impacts of any policy decreasing the costs of care for nursing homes (for example, increasing Medicaid reimbursement rates).”
A bigger immigrant labor pool would enable nursing homes to fill positions without increasing wages, Furtado said.
“With better staffing, nursing homes can provide better care” she added. “They can notice things. They can fix things when things are not going well.”
Specifically, Furtado said, a well-staffed facility might have fewer serious falls, fewer pressure wounds and fewer urinary tract infections, among other issues.
And immigrant labor could become increasingly important, Furtado said, as the large population of baby boomers ages.
The J-1 visa exchange program could assist providers looking to hire immigrant labor, according to LeadingAge. The program, which is conducted through designated U.S. sponsors, allows foreigners to participate in approved teaching, research and training programs for a set period of time.
