by Matthew Blake, MinnPost
October 14, 2025
This story is part of a series by MinnPost reporter Matthew Blake on Minnesota’s efforts to stabilize its nursing home workforce, which has long struggled with high turnover. Part one looks at the state’s plan and the pushback to it from nursing home operators. Wednesday’s story will delve into nursing homes’ complicated financial situations, and Thursday’s story will explore the reemergence of workforce standards boards.
Next March, Mary Voerding is due to celebrate her 30th year at Maplewood Rehabilitation Center, a suburban Twin Cities nursing home where she has worked as a nurse, care coordinator and now front desk receptionist.
Cracking jokes last month about how she could not wait to get photographed, Voerding put visitors, patients and management at ease. Like many nursing home workers, Voerding said that she sees her job as a calling to help those in need. Unlike many nursing facility employees, Voerding has stuck around.
Thirty-six percent of all Minnesota nursing home workers quit or are fired within one year of starting, according to data the nursing homes’ themselves report to the Minnesota Department of Human Services.
These self-reported turnover rates run the gamut between 100% annual staff retention at Good Shepherd Lutheran Home in Rushford to 25% at the Villas at Osseo in the Hennepin County city of its namesake. But if the turnover numbers vary, nursing home workers tell distressingly similar tales of stress and fatigue.
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Related: Federal cuts threaten local programs aimed at training certified nursing assistants
Understaffed and overwhelmed
Vikki Knigge, a licensed practical nurse at the Shores of Worthington, likes acting as a companion to residents.
“I just want to make sure their day is special and make sure that I make them laugh, and I listen to them and let them express what they need to express,” she said.
She works between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. each shift, which allows her to take care of her granddaughter during the day. But it also means that Knigge is used to sleeping just four hours a day.
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That amount of sleep might be enough for a routinized job. But Knigge said that each shift is full of surprises including poignant connections or painful encounters.
“Residents do get frustrated, so they’ll holler at you; so you’re dealing with that, you’re dealing with anger sometimes,” she said.
Rachel Chouanard, a trained medication aide at Parkview Care Center in the Twin Cities suburb of Buffalo, has been at her job for eight years. Chouanard attributes her unusual longevity to her interest in the nursing profession — she is currently attending classes to become a registered nurse — and belief that she is tangibly helping people.
It can be “extremely rewarding,” she said, and nice to know patients count on her. “I enjoy the residents I take care of,” she said.
Currently, Chouanard is supposed to work with 10 residents during her shift, which starts at 6 a.m. and ends at 2:30 p.m. But colleagues, many of whom are teenagers, frequently call in sick. So, she often cares for 15 residents in one day, while hustling between Parkview’s acute, long-term care and memory care units.
“I go wherever they need me and schedule me,” Chouanard said. “It can be really taxing mentally and physically.”
In addition to burnout, nursing home workers say people leave the profession due to extraordinarily stagnant pay.
In 2011, Amy Oliver began work as a certified nursing assistant, earning $12 an hour. Four years later her salary climbed to $12.72 an hour. She quit her job and went back to school.
A member of the White Earth Nation tribe, Oliver said that she wanted to stay in senior care because elders in her culture are placed on a pedestal. Currently, Oliver works as a health care unit coordinator, where she transcribes physician orders and schedules health appointments.
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But the job has found her back at a nursing home, Providence Place Senior Living in Minneapolis. Oliver said that she is fulfilling her mission to help her elders, but is also reminded of the frustrations she had as a nursing assistant.
“It is really hard to advocate for people when we are understaffed,” she said.
They don’t make nursing home workers like they used to
Nursing home operators interviewed are sympathetic to their workers’ plight. But in addition to lamenting the years-long Minnesota labor shortage that has plagued direct care industries, they cited cultural factors for why so many workers quit.
Marc Halpert, CEO of Monarch Healthcare Management, the largest for-profit nursing home chain in Minnesota and the parent company of Maplewood Rehabilitation Center, identified a shortcoming in the disproportionately young workforce that nursing homes draw from.
“I’m 42-years-old. My kids don’t have the same drive that I had at my age,” Halpert said. “In my generation, it was an expectation that you went to college and became a doctor, accountant or lawyer. Now, maybe I’m doing data analytics from my bedroom.”
Related: Staff-strapped nursing homes look to new Americans for help
Halpert said that he has tried all sorts of ways to retain employees, including signing bonuses or a surprise $1,000 check presented to someone who never calls in sick. Nonetheless, Monarch’s most recent cost report filed with the federal government, and analyzed by ProPublica, found that 51% of the company’s workers left before 12 months on the job.
“The way people have been raised has changed,” said Sharlene Knutson, administrator for McIntosh Senior Living, a nursing home in McIntosh, a town of 600 in northwest Minnesota.
Knutson said that high schoolers and recent high school graduates used to work five or six hourlong shifts at McIntosh until 9 p.m. But today, entry-level workers in her area take more mindless jobs, or drive 25 minutes to work at DigiKey Electronics, an automation products manufacturer in Thief River Falls.
“It is very difficult to find caregivers who believe in our mission,” said Knutson, who dryly added that workers are disinclined to care for residents differentiated by “how long they can hold their bladder.”
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