Providers, patients and policymakers should better incorporate informal caregivers into skilled nursing facilities to enhance professional caregivers’ capabilities and efficiencies, according to University of Pennsylvania researchers.
The decrease in discharges to SNFs could have profound implications for the future of post-acute care and may hasten a reckoning about the instability of the nation's nursing homes, physician researchers say.
Nursing home staffing during the pandemic
More than any other sector in health care, nursing homes have suffered during the pandemic. Nursing home residents and staff account for 34% of all COVID-19 deaths, though they make up less than 1% of the population. As a result of COVID-19-related concerns, the number of Americans living in nursing home has dropped by more than 10%. The result is an unprecedented financial crisis for the industry, with nursing homes closing their doors, some laying off their employees, and others being unable to safely staff their facilities.
Working conditions in nursing homes have also worsened during the pandemic first there was too little equipment to adequately protect staff, then too few tests to routinely test staff, residents, and visitors. Staff have been overburdened, overworked, and burned out during the pandemic. Numerous reports of staffing shortages have emerged in the press, and nursing homes report severe staff shortages in data they submit
Penn event discusses the challenges of integrating human services with health care thedp.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from thedp.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
E-Mail
PHILADELPHIA and MINNETONKA, Minn. High rates of COVID-19 in the county where a hospital is located appears to reduce survival rates among hospitalized patients with the virus, according to a new study from researchers in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and at UnitedHealth Group. These findings were published in
JAMA Internal Medicine. We have known that individual risk factors like age and gender, comorbidities such as obesity, and whether someone is a nursing home resident, are all part of what determines whether patients have a good or bad outcome. But our research shows it also matters where a patient is admitted, said lead investigator David Asch, MD, director of the Center for Health Care Innovation and a Professor of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.