The Nursing Home Improvement and Accountability Act is a bill that was introduced in August which addresses common issues that nursing home staff and residents face, especially in the wake of COVID. Nearly 1 in 3 COVID-related deaths were connected to nursing homes, and more than 184,000 nursing home and long-term care residents and staff have died from the virus. The NHIAA is designed to improve staffing issues, quality, oversight of nursing home and long-term care facilities, require an infection preventionist to be working full-time, and improve transparency for residents and their families. Keep reading to learn about what the bill intends to do for seniors and staff:


1. Resolve Staffing Issues

The NHIAA will require all nursing homes to employ an “infection prevention and control specialist”—someone who controls and prevents the spread of diseases—and ensure that nurses are available 24 hours a day (currently nurses must be present only 8 hours a day). It also gives power to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to study how many nurses and nursing assistants are needed in nursing homes to be able to provide quality care to residents. Then the HHS can also use that information to ensure that facilities are never understaffed.

2. Protect Seniors’ Legal Rights

Many nursing homes require applicants to sign an arbitration agreement before being admitted into the facility, which requires the residents and the facilities to resolve issues together instead of suing each other in court. The bill will protect seniors so that they won’t have to choose between long-term care and their right to sue their nursing home if they suffer during their car.

3. Ensure that Nursing Homes are Financially Stable

To ensure that nursing and long-term care facilities are financially secure, the bill requires that the post a bond of $500,000 to the HHS as an emergency fund. This bond ensures that there will always be money available in case of emergencies or unexpected circumstances, for example, if the facility must suddenly close or if it faces financial hardships. The HHS will also provide additional oversight to low-performing nursing homes to help improve their quality of care, infection control, and emergency preparedness.

4. Modernize the Physical Environments

​Facilities will receive help to upgrade their physical space for residents and staff. The NHIAA proposes to “enhance staff experience” and “promote evidence-based, patient-centered care for residents” to make nursing homes better places to live and work. There will also be a demonstration program which provides money to nursing homes so that they can invest in improving the facilities and raise workforce standards.


You can read more about the Nursing Home Improvement and Accountability Act here and read it in its entirety here.

The internet is a wellspring of free information.  But should it be?  Writers and artists work hard to earn a living.  Is the age of online information a threat to their livelihood, or can it instead be a useful tool to help their craft reach millions around the world?  This is perhaps the question at the heart of the case that examined the legality of Google’s digital library, Google Books.

Google Books strives to provide people all over the world with an online, searchable catalog of books in all languages.  This could mean much more than saving a college student a trip to the campus library.  It could mean, in theory, that even a poor farmer’s daughter in rural Thailand could have access to information and education so long as she has access to the internet.

But what does this mean for the authors of these works?  Does this online catalog infringe on their copyrights?  The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled last Friday that it does not.

The reproduction of the work must fall under the category of “fair use.”  Fair use is determined by four factors that include the purpose of use, the nature of the work, the amount of the work that’s reproduced and the effect of its reproduction on the potential market (simply put, will the writer lose money because of it?).

Google claims their efforts actually benefit copyright holders.  Google Books only reveals portions of certain pages until a customer decides to purchase access to the entire book online.  The company claims this gives potential buyers an easy way to access and purchase the works, without revealing too much information in advance that could threaten their copyright.

The digital age is saturated with an ongoing struggle to find the balance between the public’s access to information and digital media and the writer or artist or musician’s right to claim ownership over their intellectual property and use it to make a living.  This recent decision by the Federal appeals court takes another step toward finding that balance.