Understanding Why Nursing Homes Were Unprepared For The COVID Crisis

As we know, nursing home residents are part of an extremely vulnerable population to infectious disease, coronavirus included. They reside in relatively tight living quarters and share communal spaces for exercising, visiting with family and friends, daily activities, and meals. Most are also elderly or sick and have underlying conditions that put them at higher risk for contracting an illness or respiratory disease such as COVID-19. Also, the majority of long-term care facilities have proven incredibly unprepared to prevent resident exposure to preventable illnesses and diseases due to understaffing and a lack of safeguards in place to protect residents.

Today, with new guidelines in place that also restrict most visitors from seeing residents, support from family advocates who typically provide a watchdog type view of their loved one’s care has also gone awry. As a result, if a resident passes due to an outbreak of COVID-19 in a nursing home, a family will naturally have questions about what happened, and was the death the facility’s fault?