Kansas is facing a severe shortage of nursing home surveyors, with more than half of these positions at the Kansas Department for Aging and Disability Services (KDADS) currently vacant. 

As of May and June, only 29 of the 61 authorized surveyor roles were filled at KDADS, which is responsible for handling 7,000 to 9,000 annual complaints of abuse, neglect, and exploitation in nursing homes, an article in the local affiliate of NPR news noted.

And Kansas is hardly alone in facing the shortage of surveyors. While the state has one of the highest rates of nursing home surveyor vacancies in the U.S., problems with inadequate oversight due to surveyor shortage have been reported across the country. In the last year alone, news reports have documented high surveyor vacancies in New York, North Carolina, Virginia and Oregon.

Low pay is one of the reasons behind the shortage contributing to Kansas’s difficulty hiring nursing home investigators. KDADS offers between $60,000 to $62,000 annually to registered nurses (RNs), licensed RNs being a federal requirement to fulfill the surveyor role – an amount that is well below the state’s average RN salary of $79,430, the NPR story notes.

Meanwhile, nurses generally are in high demand, with over half of long-term care providers citing a shortage of RNs as a major hiring challenge, which in turn compounds the surveyor shortage – and leads to substandard care.

A recent survey by LeadingAge Kansas, which represents nonprofit nursing facilities, indicates that long-term care providers themselves have trouble hiring RNs due to a limited pool in the state.

Addressing the dire need for more surveyors would improve the state agency’s ability to promptly and thoroughly investigate complaints, KDADS communications director Cara Sloan-Ramos acknowledged.

In an email to the NPR affiliate, a KDADS spokesperson said the agency is considering options for raising pay so the jobs are competitive with other nursing positions.

The story also notes that state officials have long warned that insufficient staffing leads to systemic failures in care oversight, linking poor nursing home conditions directly to the lack of enforcement capacity among survey, certification, and licensing bodies – despite the dedication of existing staff working under increasingly difficult conditions.

And, national data underscores Kansas’s staffing crisis for surveyors. A U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging report revealed that between 2003 and 2023, surveyor vacancy rates in Kansas ballooned from 4% to 51%, making the state’s oversight team one of the most understaffed nationwide.