Question

The Covid 19 Pandemic has been devastating to many nursing homes. The data show that a disproportionate share of nursing home residents died as a result of Covid 19.  What can you a future health care practitioner and/or manager learn from this event? We should learn from this experience; might help us the next time; there will be the next time.

How did decisions by NYS (Department of Health and/or the Governor) impact nursing homes?

Answer 1

Answer : health care practitioners and managers should learn many things from the Covid19 pandemic related complications happened in nursing homes. According to recent surveys, almost 41% of covid related deaths in the USA itself and 60% in the worldwide. There are many reason for spreading covid19 infection in nursing homes ,they are 1) staff shortages : lack of adequate Health care workers increased the severity of the disease. For instance , because of the staff shortage , health care workers assisted the Covid 19 affected patient's and unaffected patient's together . 2) Many  of the nursing home health care staff worked in different nursing homes and majority of the nursing homes don't have own staff ,this also became the contributing factor for pandemic . 3) Lack of adequate PPE : Many of the health care workers have forced to work without proper PPE and it affected their and residents health . 4) Lack of Fast investigation methods : nursing homes have no facility to check antigen or other investigation facility to detect the disease early. 5) Lack of standard operating procedures also the major factors for increasing covid related deaths and complications. The managers and health practitioners should check and learn this problems thoroughly and try to solve by 1) recruiting adequate number of health care workers 2) recruit sufficient and permanent health care workers for each nursing homes separately . 3) arrange sufficient PPE kits for all staffs . 4) Arrange fast and accurate blood or other investigation labs for detecting pandemics or other infected disease . 5) give proper training for the staff to follow standard operating procedures. 1) The Government and health care department take more considerations on nursing homes and supervise the nursing home protocol and make changes according to the new situations. 2) Establish strict rules and regulations for nursing homes to implement the standard operating procedures , health care workers and other matters . Government or health department supervision in each matters are important for improving the standard of nursing homes and preventing death rates. 3) All new standard changes bring to the nursing homes as other government hospital .