As most people now know, the nursing home industry has been taking a terrible beating over the past year due to the COVID Pandemic. Many residents have died from the disease. Subsequently, there are people who believe that the nursing home system is largely responsible for this due to the nature of its communal living and physical structure.
Now there appears to be a movement to resolve the short comings of nursing homes, to minimize them or eliminate them all together. With all due respect, the people who are proposing these ideas clearly don’t have sound information on how and why nursing homes exist, and the type of clients they actually service. Some of the alternatives that are being proposed just support that.
The best way to look at this is to consider the types of people who live in nursing homes and the clinical, psychological, and physical needs they require. By their individual conditions, who are these people? The most common examples are as follows:
The Wanderer:
These are normally people with varying degrees of dementia. They are confused regarding many issues including their surroundings, and have an on-going need to move, whether it be to seek their homes or to find loved ones. They are some of the saddest cases in a nursing home because we know that this was not always their condition. They were independent individuals with their own lives, careers, families, interests, and loves. And now, that’s gone. So if there were no nursing homes to care for them, where would they go? Their families can’t care for them; they’re a full time job. Would an Assisted Living Facility be appropriate? Assisted Living is just another form of healthcare facility, just for higher functioning people. They’re not designed for the Wanderer. Place them in a foster home where they may walk off in the middle of the night and get run over by a truck? Probably not.
The Non-Ambulatory Resident:
These are people incapable of walking or at least walking on their own. They’re non-ambulatory for a myriad of reasons, such as extreme age and weakness, or loss of legs either from accident or diabetes, or debilitated from cancer, et al. These people are at high risk for such issues as pressure sores, pneumonia, circulatory problems, weight gain/weight loss, or falls. They need to be turned and positioned on a regular basis to help prevent these types of maladies. Beside a nursing home, where are you going to obtain that type of service? In private homes? We don’t have enough healthcare workers now. Where are we going to find the army of workers for home visits, even if a home is available.
Respirator Resident:
Do you have any idea of the needs and costs to care for the respiratory resident? Let’s not even go there.
High Clinical Need Resident:
Again, a high need for hands on and time consuming nursing and clinical support service, not to mention Pharmaceutical support.
These are just some examples of people who reside in nursing homes. They reside there because of their particular needs that only nursing homes can provide them on a group basis.
True, nursing homes are troubled and certainly should be physically restructured to reduce the risk of the spread of disease. But where are the hundreds of millions of dollars going to come from to accomplish that?
It’s said that a people are judged by history on how they treat or protect the weakest and most vulnerable among them. We have a great challenge before us as a people. How are we going to be judged?
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LTC Strategic Solutions
We are a long term care consulting and advisory firm focusing upon skilled nursing facility operations. We also provide services for the recruitment of Licensed Nursing Home Administrators for both Interim or Permanent assignments, and also Directors of Nursing.
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