LETTER: Stands behind nursing home workers
Pennsylvania’s nursing homes are entrusted with tremendous responsibility to protect our aging and disabled loved ones and provide them with quality, compassionate care. We expect these institutions that steward both human life and taxpayer dollars to do their due diligence and deliver on their responsibilities with honesty and integrity.
Pennsylvania’s newly approved state budget allocates a historic $600 million for nursing and long-term care with a requirement that 70% of that funding go toward staffing and resident care. Despite these accountability measures, Comprehensive, which is one of Pennsylvania’s largest nursing home chains, is refusing to direct public taxpayer dollars to staffing and resident care as intended.
Recently, union caregivers at several nursing homes, including The Grove at Washington in my district, voted to send unfair labor practice strike notices to their nursing home owners and then began to strike due to the absence of a good faith agreement that invests properly in resident care and staffing.
I stand behind these workers as they hold some of our state’s largest nursing home chains accountable to Pennsylvania taxpayers and demand the highest standards of patient care and excellence for residents, caregivers, and our communities.
As anyone with a loved one in a nursing home knows, this isn’t a partisan issue. Our aging and disabled loved ones deserve better, and they deserve the investments they were promised.
Pa. Sen. Camera Bartolotta
R-46 District