This bill amends existing Washington law (RCW 43.20A.715 and RCW 74.39A.056) to change procedures governing background checks, disqualification, and temporary work authorization for long-term care workers, individual providers, home care agency providers, contracted providers, and licensees. It establishes that certain convictions become "nonautomatically disqualifying" after specified time periods (selling cannabis to a person under RCW 69.50.401: 3 years; first degree theft: 10 years; second degree robbery, second degree extortion, second and third degree assault: 5 years). It preserves exceptions for background checks performed for the Department of Children, Youth, and Families and for most department employees or applicants. It does not create new crimes or change criminal penalties. The bill makes procedural changes: it authorizes employers or other authorized entities to conduct a discretionary character, competence, and suitability review when a background check produces a "review required result," requires the department to adopt rules for those reviews, limits when employers must repeat such reviews (including a ten-year trigger in some circumstances), and requires notice to clients or guardians before any temporary unsupervised access during a review. It requires fingerprint-based federal and state checks (including FBI records) for long-term care workers hired on or after January 7, 2012, and states the department shall require fingerprints and shall not pass the cost of these checks to workers (the provision cuts off in the provided text). The bill also directs the department to create and maintain a state registry of long-term care workers with final substantiated findings of abuse, neglect, financial exploitation, or abandonment of a vulnerable adult, to disclose those findings on request, and to share registry information with the Department of Health. Clients who elect services from an individual provider must be given background check results and may request copies; authorized entities must provide records when a review-required result occurs. The provided text is incomplete in places: the specific agency referred to as "the department" is not identified here, a sentence about not passing fingerprint check costs to workers is cut off, and implementing rules and cross-referenced RCW provisions are not fully included.

If this becomes law, more long-term care workers with older or certain nonpermanent convictions could be allowed to be considered for jobs instead of being automatically excluded, which likely makes it easier for some people to get hired or keep working in home care, nursing homes, and other long-term care settings. Employers and consumer-directed clients will have new obligations to run a character, competence, and suitability review in some cases, to share background check results with clients or their guardians before care starts, and to offer clients a written notice and chance to decline when someone is given up to 30 days of unsupervised access while a fingerprint-based FBI check is completed. That shifts some hiring discretion from automatic rules to employer and department judgment, and it may reduce turnover for workers with dated convictions while increasing employers’ time and paperwork for reviews and notices. The state agency named as “the department” would need to write rules, operate a registry of workers with final substantiated findings of abuse or neglect, and share that registry with the Department of Health, which adds administrative work and ongoing disclosure duties; employers must also ensure fingerprint checks at hire (with a limited exception) and follow new documentation and disclosure duties. There are practical uncertainties in the text provided: the specific agency called “the department” is not identified here, and a sentence about who bears the cost of fingerprint checks is cut off, so it’s unclear whether the state or employers ultimately cover those expenses.