Pandemonium in nursing homes amid outbreak

I am the third generation of nursing home administrators in my family, but the first to face a statewide lockdown and witness the hardships that coronavirus carries for health care workers and nursing home residents. Familyowned and -operated companies like ours are focused on keeping our residents safe, while hoping that front-line staff continue to risk their health instead of being safe at home with their families. The quickly approaching fog of unknown, as coronavirus spreads through Connecticut and into our homes, has put elderly patients and their health caretakers on high alert with a fear that our resources won’t withstand this novel virus.

Partnerships between nursing homes, hospitals, and the state and federal government are essential to maintaining a safe work environment and to prepare for the onslaught of this new virus. There is already a national workforce shortage of nurses and certified nursing assistants, which is only widening under the current pandemic. Additional government programs, such as child care and housing for health care workers now that schools have been closed, will support hands-on employees. Local hospital and nursing home alliances can amalgamate the intensive care and infection control expertise of hospitals with supplemental bed capacity and geriatric knowledge of nursing facilities.

As coronavirus inevitably enters community nursing homes, daily costs will continue to soar. Additional expenses from aggressive virus testing, isolation rooms, personal protective equipment and extra staff to care for infected patients will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Pooling together resources between government, hospitals and nursing homes will reduce financial burden, alleviate the stress of understaffing from health care workers and offer high-quality care to infected patients. A relaxation on industry regulations will offer leeway to improve staffing and infection control until the virus subsides. Expediting the hiring process of health care workers by allowing accelerated certified nursing assistant courses and immediate fingerprint results for faster hiring will exponentially increase available front-line staff. Collaboration between the federal and state governments, nursing homes and hospitals is essential to overcoming COVID-19 and preventing thousands of elderly deaths.

In my home state of Connecticut, we are in the infancy stages of joining forces with a neighboring hospital and state officials to reopen multiple closed nursing homes to run as active COVID-19 centers. By combining the unique strengths that each of these operations possess, we can offer superior care to hundreds more elderly patients with COVID-19 in Connecticut. Today we have an unprecedented opportunity to gain long overdue health care system integration to defeat this war on the deadly pandemic.