ROCHESTER, N.Y. — There are not enough nursing home beds in our community for people who need them. Patients are stacking up in our local hospitals because of it.

It’s a crisis that News10NBC has been investigating for more than a year now. In an effort to help ease the overcrowding, URMC has partnered with St. John’s, a skilled nursing home along Highland Avenue. 

St. John’s Home is licensed for 455 nursing home beds but currently is only operating about 300 of them.  It has the space to be able to open up more beds, most of our local nursing homes do, the problem is staffing. All nursing homes, particularly the ones who accept Medicaid patients, are struggling to make ends meet.   

“Medicaid rates just don’t keep up with the competitive salaries that people are looking for. The other thing is, it’s a really hard job and we’ve noticed, we’re not losing a lot of our folks to the industry and other providers, we’re losing them to Walmart and Target and retail,” says Charlie Runyon, St. John’s President and CEO. 

Because of that, local hospitals are backing up with people waiting for a spot.

“We tend to sit now with anywhere between 80 and the high 90s when it comes to patients waiting for nursing homes at Strong and 20-25 at Highland,” explains the COO of Strong Memorial Hospital, Kathy Parrinello. 

As News10NBC has been reporting, hospitals have been forced to send patients hundreds of miles away for care because there are so few local spots. 

Since the state hasn’t made any significant increases to the Medicaid reimbursement rate for nursing homes, URMC and St. John’s decided to try and do something about the crisis themselves.

“Short term, they have a number of postings and they’ve begun to be able to hire staff. But they need to onboard and train them quickly. So, we will help them accelerate the training of staff,” explains Parrinello. 

Long term, the plan is to bring a dialysis unit directly to St. Johns.

“Often patients that need chronic dialysis for the rest of their life and they need a nursing home bed, it becomes very difficult for nursing homes to accept that patient because then they have to transport them,” says Parrinello. “We’re also planning to help them renovate one of closed units to better service our pediatric patients.”