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Reflections (continued)
Americans face today.
Making nursing homes the de facto choice for older Ameri- cans in need of care set the stage for the ravages of the pandemic, says Patricia McGinnis, executive director of California Advo- cates for Nursing Home Reform. “Nursing homes are not good places for anyone except for short-term rehab,” McGinnis says. “I would hope this is a wake-up call that the system isn’t working.”
After doing consulting in nursing homes for over 35 years, I agree with McGinnis. But this will require a major paradigm shift. We tend to “warehouse” the elderly in our country, and it is now reflected in the high percentage of nursing home elderly stricken during the Covid-19 crisis. Countries such as Jamaica, where I have gone many years to provide free medical care, have few nursing homes. Despite the built-in difficulties to provide vaccines in Jamaica, fewer seniors are institutionalized in long- term care facilities and therefore less prone to Covid-19 infection.
Now that the Covid-19 genie is out of the bottle, it can never be put back and the results cannot be reversed. The new paradigm may shift to short-term rehab, as McGinnis writes, or a hybrid of our current model. Whatever the outcome, I hope there are
major changes in a system that has been proven defective and deadly during Covid-19. As Eaton writes, “the American nursing home industry exists as it does today because of federal laws and regulations that go back 85 years. The infrastructure these laws created, no matter how well intended, didn’t anticipate the future, nor could it foresee a health storm of this magnitude, speed and deadliness.”
We are overdue for a major change in our long-term care system. I believe we have a strong obligation to our elderly and disabled to provide the safest and most effective prevention and medical care.
Reference
Who’s to Blame for the 100,000 COVID Dead in Long-Term Care? Finger-pointing in wake of health disaster is widespread, but causes were laid decades ago, by Joe Eaton, December 3, 2020, AARP Bulletin
https://www.aarp.org/caregiving/health/info-2020/covid- 19-nursing-homes-who-is-to-blame/
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     HCMA BULLETIN, Vol 66, No. 4 – Spring 2021
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