Bill Text: NJ A4150 | 2024-2025 | Regular Session | Introduced
Bill Title: Permits certified nurse aides to be employed as personal care assistants.
Spectrum: Partisan Bill (Democrat 2-0)
Status: (Introduced) 2024-04-04 - Introduced, Referred to Assembly Regulated Professions Committee [A4150 Detail]
Download: New_Jersey-2024-A4150-Introduced.html
Sponsored by:
Assemblywoman SHANIQUE SPEIGHT
District 29 (Essex and Hudson)
Assemblyman STERLEY S. STANLEY
District 18 (Middlesex)
SYNOPSIS
Permits certified nurse aides to be employed as personal care assistants.
CURRENT VERSION OF TEXT
As introduced.
An Act concerning certified nurse aides and personal care assistants, and supplementing Title 26 of the Revised Statutes.
Be It Enacted by the Senate and General Assembly of the State of New Jersey:
1. A health care facility, licensed pursuant to P.L.1971, c.136 (C.26:2H-1 et seq.), shall be permitted to employ a certified or conditionally nurse aide in the capacity of a personal care assistant.
2. This act shall take effect immediately.
STATEMENT
This bill permits certified nurse aides to be employed as personal care assistants.
Under the bill, a licensed health care facility is to be permitted to employ a certified or conditionally nurse aide (CNA) in the capacity of a personal care assistant.
It is the sponsor's belief that CNAs have a critically important job in caring for our most frail and vulnerable older adults. Due to the nature of this job, CNAs often experience repeated exposure to serious illness, suffering, and death of residents, many of whom they have become close to over time. This may cause CNAs to experience issues with emotional well-being, personal health, and the ability to provide appropriate care. These daily challenges may have a negative, rippling effect from CNAs, to residents, to long-term care facilities.
It is the sponsor's belief that the pandemic caused by COVID-19 (COVID) magnified the challenges faced by CNAs. During COVID, CNAs faced stress and burn-out due to the pandemic. Combined with the advanced age, frailty, and chronic comorbidities typically experienced by nursing home residents, there were high rates of severe illness and death in nursing homes due to COVID. Of all staff, CNAs may have spent the most time with and may have provided the most personal care to residents compared to other health care providers.
It is the sponsor's belief that the experience of COVID was traumatic as CNAs felt largely on their own to manage COVID-related challenges. CNAs faced complex challenges both on and off the job especially at the outset of the pandemic, driven largely by the scope of the emergency and the lack of a coordinated governmental response to the unprecedented crisis.
It is the sponsor's belief that a certified nurse aide who is working as a personal care assistant should earn the same wage as that individual would be earning while employed as a certified nurse aide.
