NY To Require Background Checks Health Aides

July 10, 2003
New York will require nursing home aides, home health aides and personal care aides to undergo FBI criminal background checks before they can work in nursing homes in the state.

Convicted killers, rapists, kidnappers and arsonists will be banned for life from working in nursing home and home health care jobs. All others will felony convictions will be banned for 10 years under the plan devised by Gov. George Pataki and Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.

The cost of the background check, $24, will not be assessed to applicants. Nursing homes will have discretion on hiring applicants with non-felony convictions.

One in four nursing home employees charged with patient abuse turns out to have a prior conviction, said Kevin Ryan, a spokesman for Spitzer's Medicare Fraud Unit. Since 1975, investigators have made 375 patient abuse arrests, Ryan said.

Spitzer said the number of elder abuse cases in which health care workers had a history of criminal behavior was "alarming."

A Manhattan-based consumers group said the new regulations don't go far enough.

"It doesn't make sense to single out unlicensed workers in general when anybody could be a potential criminal," said Richard Mollot, associate director of the Nursing Home Community Coalition.

He said the proposal does not address the problem of understaffing, which he said causes patients to suffer on a daily basis.