More and more, we are seeing that one of the main reasons why nursing homes were hit so hard by the COVID-19 pandemic was because of poor organization and oversight. As you’re probably aware, nursing homes accounted for about half of all of the COVID related deaths here in the U.S. Part of this was because of the lack of information that we as a people had in the early days of the pandemic when it came to the virus itself. No one was really sure how it spread, what it did, or how to prevent exposure. We all took precautions like masking and social distancing, but in many cases, this wasn’t enough to keep people safe, especially those that were most vulnerable to infection.
But this was only half of the issue. The other part of it was indicative of a much bigger issue when it comes to senior care. In reality, although there are care standards all across the country (and the world, for that matter), these standards differed widely from state to state and even from facility to facility. While some nursing homes and assisted living facilities offered a very high quality of care, complete with protections in place to keep seniors from suffering from infectious outbreaks, not all of them did. Some states had higher standards than others, while some care facilities held themselves to a higher standard, even if they weren’t required to do so.
Disorganization within the care industry has been one of the main culprits for lower quality care for seniors. Not only were care services not on the same page when it came to protecting the elderly and safeguards for staff, they were not acting in a uniform or cohesive manner when it came to sharing what worked and what was dangerous for staff and residents. Unfortunately, it’s a lot easier to see this in hindsight than it is at the time. A lot of people lost their lives because of this. Now that we have better information and this issue has been cast into the limelight, we need to make good use of the information. Otherwise, we are putting future lives at risk and run the chances of creating a similar situation down the road.
Organized care matters. This is one of the hidden benefits of the pandemic. As I mentioned above, COVID has made a huge number of people a lot more aware of problems and potential problems in the care industry. The U.S. government has seen the urgency of the issue and is in the process of creating better infrastructure to protect those receiving senior care. Local care facilities are more aware of the best practices that they should be employing to protect the people under their supervision.
There’s still a long way to go, but improved data collection, communication, and other safeguards will only be good for our elderly loved ones in the future. The pandemic has been an unspeakable tragedy, but we owe it to future seniors to learn from it and make care better so that seniors can live the highest quality of life possible.
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