One of the topics that I have written about frequently over the last few months is how the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed many of the shortcomings in the senior care system. These issues have been there for years, but the strain of the pandemic on care thrust them out into the spotlight.
It has brought up a very important question. What can be done to help fix these care shortcomings moving forward?
Ideas have come in from all over. For example, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently revealed in his state budget proposal that New York State would like to increase daily fines for nursing homes that violate state ordinances from $1,000 per day to $10,000 per day. Some have hailed this as a strong preventive measure to encourage senior care facilities to step up their game. Many more have decried it as a harsh punishment for care homes that have already been hit hard by the pandemic. At this stage, this is just a proposal, but it could potentially be passed into law in the coming weeks for New York nursing homes.
New York has come under fire in the past few weeks, but they are certainly not alone in having poorly managed nursing homes. For example, reports from Canada’s military while they were tasked with helping out at nursing homes there found that many residents were kept for extended periods of times in dirty diapers, they were being given expired medications, and that ants and cockroaches had infested some of the facilities. In more than a few cases, nursing home conditions were despicable beforehand; the pandemic just brought these things out into the open.
Awareness is the first step to fixing things. The next step is to address how we can move forward and fix it.
The system as a whole tends to move slowly. You don’t need to wait for the system to change before you make your decisions. You can take action now to ensure that the care that a love one receives is the high quality of care that your family deserves. This may mean avoiding the nursing home and going in another direction altogether. That’s okay. The current reliance on the nursing home model has helped to create a lot of the issues that we are seeing now. That doesn’t mean that nursing homes are bad, just that they have been overburdened because not everyone that resides within them absolutely must be there. Too often nursing homes are used as a first line of defence, and not a final resort.
In-home care might be what you’ve been looking for. While finding the ideal type of care might not fix the system as a whole, many shortcomings would be resolved if a large number of people did this. Fixing senior care will be easier if each individual in need had a wide array of choices and an understanding of how their needs would be met through each one of those options. Rather than focus on fixing the “system,” we should be focusing on how we can give an individual that care that they deserve.
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