Emergency medical technicians transported a patient from a nursing home to an emergency room bed at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Yonkers, N.Y., last year.Credit...John Minchillo/Associated Press

Extraordinarily high turnover among staffs at nursing homes likely contributed to the shocking number of deaths at the facilities during the pandemic, the authors of a new study suggested.

The study, which was published Monday in Health Affairs, a health policy journal, represents a comprehensive look at the turnover rates in 15,645 nursing homes across the country, accounting for nearly all of the facilities certified by the federal government. The researchers found the average annual rate was 128 percent, with some facilities experiencing turnover that exceeded 300 percent.

“It was really staggering,” said David Grabowski, a professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School and one of the study’s authors. Researchers pointed to the findings to urge Medicare to publish the turnover rates at individual nursing home sites, as a way of putting a spotlight on substandard conditions and pressuring owners to make improvements.

Inadequate staffing — and low pay — has long plagued nursing homes and quality-of-care for the more than one million residents who live in these facilities. But the pandemic has exposed these issues even more sharply, with investigations underway into some states’ oversight of the facilities as Covid cases spiraled unchecked and deaths skyrocketed.

The high turnover rate likely made it harder for nursing homes to put in place strong infection controls during the pandemic, and led to rampant spread of the coronavirus, said Ashvin Gandhi, the lead author and a health economist and assistant professor at the University of California Los Angeles Anderson School of Management.

Nursing-home owners blame inadequate reimbursement from Medicaid, the federal-state program for elderly skilled nursing care.

“Workforce recruitment and retention is among the most pressing challenges confronting longterm care providers, and we have been calling for help for years,” Dr. David Gifford, the chief medical officer for the American Health Care Association and National Center for Assisted Living, a trade group, said in an emailed statement.

“It’s high past time that providers receive the proper resources to invest in our frontline caregivers in order to improve quality care,” he said.

At least 172,000 deaths from the virus had been reported among either residents or employees of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities by late February, according to a databasecompiled by The New York Times. The nursing home death toll alone has accounted for more than one-third of all Covid deaths in the United States, although death and case rates have begun to decline steeply as more than 70 percent of residents have received vaccinations.

Eleanor Garrison, a resident of Arbor Springs Health and Rehabilitation Center in Opelika, Ala., last month.Credit...Julie Bennett/Associated Press

Industry criticism has also focused on decades of ownership of nursing homes by private equity and other private investment firms, which prioritized profits for investors above the well-being of residents. These owners have long been accused of insufficiently staffing their facilities and underpaying workers.