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The Biden administration this month will begin spot audits of nursing home use of antipsychotic drugs in an effort to cut down on inappropriate prescriptions. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will conduct "targeted, off-site audits" to check whether nursing home patients who are prescribed the drugs have a schizophrenia diagnosis. (Alltucker, 1/18)

CMS will start targeted audits to ask nursing homes for documentation of the diagnoses in the coming days, focusing on nursing homes with existing residents who have been recorded as having schizophrenia. The rating scores for nursing homes that have a pattern of inaccurately coding residents as having schizophrenia will be negatively impacted, CMS said in a statement released Wednesday, stopping short of threatening to levy fines against facilities. (Seitz, 1/18)

For nearly 43 years, Francine Turner-Minor has distributed medicine to patients at a Baden neighborhood nursing home. On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Turner-Minor went on strike from Hillside Manor Healthcare and Rehab Center, where about 130 elderly residents live, according to the latest count in federal data. Workers here say the facility is infested with bed bugs, mice and cockroaches, and they say they’ve faced union-busting tactics and unequal pay from the facility’s owners, New Jersey-based Luxor Healthcare. The concerns have become so dire that city leaders plan to investigate. Luxor Healthcare, which owns health care facilities nationwide, denied the union’s allegations. (Landis and Merrilees, 1/17)

Amid a nursing shortage that is worsening poor health outcomes in Mississippi, nursing programs at the state’s public universities are turning away hundreds of potential students every year because of insufficient faculty sizes. Alfred Rankins Jr., Mississippi’s commissioner of higher education, said at a legislative hearing Tuesday that nursing programs have struggled to retain faculty members because of the state’s lower-than-average salaries for public university employees. (Goldberg, 1/17)

Socially isolated older adults have a 27% higher chance of developing dementia than older adults who aren't, a new study by Johns Hopkins researchers found. "Social connections matter for our cognitive health, and it is potentially easily modifiable for older adults without the use of medication," Dr. Thomas Cudjoe, an assistant professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins and a senior author of the study, said in a news release. (Radde, 1/17)

French nun Sister André, the world’s oldest known person, died on Tuesday at the age of 118 in the southern city of Toulon. The city’s mayor, Hubert Falco, announced the news of her death on Twitter, writing that “it is with immense sadness and emotion that I learnt tonight of the passing of the world’s oldest person #SisterAndré.” (Vandoorne, 1/18)