• Posted January 21, 2026

More Staff Means Better Health Among Nursing Home Residents, Study Says

Boosting staffing levels at nursing homes could improve the health of residents, a new study says.

Fewer residents wound up with injuries and illnesses after an Illinois program increased staff at nursing homes with Medicaid patients, researchers reported Jan. 16 in JAMA Health Forum.

“We found that a Medicaid policy that incentivized high staffing levels was associated with modest improvement in some dimensions of patient health,” wrote the research team led by Andrew Olenski, an assistant professor of economics at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

The Illinois policy provided nursing homes with bonus Medicaid reimbursements based on staffing levels, researchers said in background notes.

In an earlier study, the research team found that the reform had increased nurse staffing by 12% at the facilities.

But it wasn’t clear whether better staffing had any impact on residents’ health, researchers said.

For the new study, researchers reviewed Medicaid claims to track deaths, hospitalizations and ER visits among nearly 2.6 million nursing home residents between 2021 and 2023.

The team compared the health of Illinois nursing home residents to those in other states, and also compared the Illinois facilities against other homes in the state that don’t take many Medicaid patients.

Results showed that after the reform boosted staffing, hospitalizations among nursing home residents declined by about 4%.

“Even modest effects are extremely meaningful at scale: these estimates suggest that if a similar reform were adopted nationally, there would be 6,142 fewer hospitalizations each year,” the researchers wrote.

However, further research is needed to verify these results, the team said.

More information

Harvard Medical School has more on nursing home care.

SOURCE: JAMA Health Forum, Jan. 16, 2026