It isn’t often that the Department of Public Health mandates staffing or requires nursing homes to hire consultants, but an order issued last spring to one facility reflects a broader emerging problem affecting the care provided at many nursing homes: insufficient staffing levels and caregivers who lack training.

As fertility rates fall nationwide, Connecticut continues to rank among the lowest in the country — a trend doctors attribute to women here delaying childbearing.
In 2016, the most recent year for which state-level data is available, Connecticut had 53.4 births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44, compared with a national average of 62 per 1,000 women.