Willow Haven: RN Staffing Gaps on 23 Days in 2025 - OH
Continuing Healthcare at Willow Haven, a 69-to-78-bed long-term care facility on Taylor Street, has been running most of its nights with a single RN and filling daytime and weekend gaps with two nurses available on an as-needed basis. The facility's wound care nurse, who would have helped cover some of those hours, has been out on medical leave.
The gaps fell hardest on weekends. The Director of Nursing said that was where the shortage hurt most, and the staffing schedules bore it out. Six consecutive Sundays from early June through late June had no eight-hour RN block. The pattern repeated in May, with gaps on the 4th, 10th, 11th, 18th, and 25th.
When inspectors asked the Director of Nursing what the shortage meant practically for the residents inside the building, the answer was direct. The facility cannot accept patients who need central lines. It cannot take patients on total parenteral nutrition. It cannot handle orders for IV therapy more than twice a day. Those are not hypothetical restrictions. They are the facility's current operating limits, set by the availability of a registered nurse or an IV-trained licensed practical nurse on any given shift.
The facility has been trying to hire. Between January 9 and August 6 of this year, staff interviewed four registered nurse candidates and hired two of them. A certified nursing aide who passed her nursing boards during that stretch was scheduled to join the RN roster in September. The open positions have been posted on the company website, at job fairs, and on at least one social media platform, though the Director of Nursing told inspectors she was not certain which one.
None of it has been enough. On August 21, the last day of the inspection, the Director of Nursing confirmed the facility still could not meet the requirement of having a registered nurse on duty for eight consecutive hours every day of the week. She attributed the difficulty to a broader shift in the workforce. Registered nurses, she said, do not want to work in long-term care anymore since COVID-19.
That may be true across the industry. It does not change what the schedules showed.
What made the finding harder to explain was what inspectors found when they asked about the facility's staffing policy. The administrator told them, at 1:47 in the afternoon on the final day of the survey, that there was no staffing policy. The facility uses its budget to determine staffing.
A budget is not a staffing plan. The facility's own assessment tool, revised in March 2025, described an approach that accounts for resident population, varying care needs, and other factors to gauge sufficient staff. But when inspectors looked for the policy that would govern how those judgments get made and documented, there was nothing to find.
The inspection covered the second quarter of 2025 through the Payroll-Based Journal, the federal system nursing homes use to report actual hours worked by staff. The journal confirmed what the schedules showed. The facility did not meet the eight-consecutive-hour RN requirement on multiple days in every month from January through July.
Seventy-eight residents were living at Willow Haven on the days when no registered nurse was on duty for a full eight-hour stretch. Some of them needed wound care. Some of them, presumably, needed the kind of clinical judgment that a licensed practical nurse is not authorized to provide alone. The inspection report does not document any specific resident who was harmed on those days. It rates the violation as potential harm, not actual harm.
The distinction matters legally. It does not change what the nights looked like.
Full Inspection Report
The details above represent a summary of key findings. View the complete inspection report for Continuing Healthcare At Willow Haven from 2025-08-21 including all violations, facility responses, and corrective action plans.
Additional Resources
Data source: Official federal inspection data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).
Editorial process: AI-synthesized regulatory data, reviewed for accuracy by our editorial team.
Professional review: All content reviewed by Christopher F. Nesbitt, Sr., NH EMT & BU-trained Paralegal.
Last verified: July 3, 2026 · Our methodology
CONTINUING HEALTHCARE AT WILLOW HAVEN in ZANESVILLE, OH was cited for violations during a health inspection on August 21, 2025.
The facility's wound care nurse, who would have helped cover some of those hours, has been out on medical leave.
Health inspections identify deficiencies that facilities must correct. Violations range from minor documentation issues to serious safety concerns. Review the full report below for specific details and facility response.