Nursing Homes

As predicted, many of those hit the hardest during the Covid-19 pandemic were residents and workers within nursing home facilities around the world. Many experienced severe side effects of the virus as well as unfortunate fatalities. The high contagiousness of this virus combined with its aggressive nature within elderly patients, made nursing homes very susceptible to these horrors. As we all we all witnessed, the unexpected qualities of this pandemic also added to unpreparedness of many. Many nursings home responded swiftly to help minimize exposure as much as possible and many new protocols were instilled such as:

  • No visitations
  • No group activities
  • regular temperature checks
  • covid tests of all residents
  • covid test for all workers

Future Concerns

Many if not all of these protocols are still in place around nursing homes today however, the question on the minds of many seems to be” how will nursing homes change or proceed moving forward”? Many residents turn to nursing home facilities in order to ensure safe and proper care is provided to their elderly loved ones who can no longer care for themself. This means that the main goal here is for nursing homes to provide a safe and quality environment. Since the covid-19 pandemic makes these nursing homes especially vulnerable nursing home will have to take extra precautions in order to continue to do so and here are some of the main concerns:

  • Understaffed– Nursing homes have long been notorious for an undersupply of workers leading to past issues with understaffing. Following this pandemic it has become clearer that more hand on deck are now needed to provide additional sanitation. temp checks, and rotations should staff become ill.
  • Low Nursing home standard– Nursing homes have always had regulations in place to help enforce the safety and quality within each facility. Unfortunately, prior to this pandemic these standards were often not enforced and faced low penalties for such. In addition to previous standards, it can be expected that many new protocols will be needed to ensure continual safety moving forward.
  • No at home option with medicaid– It is clear that many individuals would prefer to receive at home long-term care services within their own home however, medicaid will not fund such.

These are just a few of the concerns facing nursing homes and resident living conditions moving forward. Tune into tomorrow’s post to learn on what can be done to help remedy these concerns and to learn about how long-term care insurance me be pivotal now more than ever. If you or someone you love is interested in Long Term Care Insurance be sure to visit: LTC TREE for more information.