The suggestion that either a licensed nursing home administrator or RN should be exempted from fulfilling the licensure testing requirements applicable to everyone else – including current assisted living administrators - is incongruent, and possibly an unfair employment practice. In any exemption for individuals licensed in other areas, a singular class of employee is being provided an employment advantage over the existing class of employees (assisted living administrators), as well as other qualified but unlicensed healthcare professionals - such as hospital administrators. The nursing home administrators issue is compounded because they are additionally exempted from the assisted living experience requirement, meaning they will not have had to even work in an assisted living community to assume an administrator position - even over experienced assisted living administrators.
The argument that either the nursing home administrator or RN license is inclusive of the skill set and information appropriate for work as an assisted living administrator is also incongruent. The
More than 40 states continue to use the recognized and more applicable combination of education and experience as the foundational requirements for work as an assisted living administrator, vs. repeating the mistake of over regulation, followed by the layer-upon-layer of follow-up regulations we are already seeing with assisted living administrator licensing in