Plenty of studies have shown that care quality in nursing homes suffers when nursing assistants “work short,” but a new analysis of Medicare and other data reaches a startling conclusion: Nursing assistant staffing levels may literally be a matter of life and death for nursing home residents.
A group of researchers from the University of California, Davis, looked into why more people die during times of low unemployment, questioning the conventional wisdom that the cause is stress from overwork. As reported in Why Do More People Die During Economic Expansions?, they found that only 9 percent of the 6,700 additional deaths associated with a one-percent decline in unemployment in 2006 occurred among people of working age, while three-quarters occurred among elders. Women over 65 were particularly hard hit, accounting for more than half (55%) of the deaths. Continue reading »












