Oahu Home Healthcare said it will shut down this month, leaving just eight at-home healthcare providers to serve Oahu’s growing senior population. “Many of these facilities have waiting lists. Now, with this facility shutting down, how are those people going to be placed?” said Kealii Lopez, AARP state director. “Those people now need to be placed with other facilities, which are already overflowing.” The company said its closure is due to increased costs brought on by Medicaid reimbursement changes and the statewide labor shortage.
Susan Sabo-Wagner, MSN, RN, OCN, executive director of clinical strategy for Oncology Consultants of Houston, Texas, discussed how limited understanding on how to care for one’s health and extenuating circumstances can contribute to a higher likelihood of infection, ineffective health habits, and increased need of resources.
Transcript
What are some of the biggest challenges that your patients may face, if they are receiving cancer care support at home, in their housing conditions?
That's mostly the unsafe areas. Definitely depending on where you live, where you're from, where you reside, you have unsafe neighborhoods. You have home health that may not want to go into those neighborhoods. You might have a great home health network, which might be in that area, but maybe not in that particular area. You have increased risk of infection, because you have people, you think that, “hey, you're gonna be doing fine,” and even maybe in a better area, but they just don't take care of themselves, or they can't take care of themselves, or somebody is supposed to be taking care of them but neglecting them. Then you have increased risk for infection. That's one of the number one things that happens to patients on chemotherapy is they get some sort of infection due to when their immune system is down.
Several residents from a long-term care facility in Metcalfe County were transported to Fair Oaks Nursing and Rehab in Jamestown on Saturday. According to the Metcalfe Health Care Center, water pipes in the facility froze and broke in multiple parts of the facility, causing administrators to evacuate residents of the facility to Fair Oaks and other facilities in nearby counties. The Jamestown Volunteer Fire Department and other agencies assisted in the transport.
Many long-term care staff and residents in Arizona are skipping the COVID-19 bivalent booster shot. David Voepel is the CEO of the Arizona Healthcare Association, which represents nursing homes in the state. "Arizona's last in vaccine uptake, and not just the regular vaccine, but I'm talking [about] the bivalent booster. And we're lasted that both on staff and on residents," Voepel said. Voepel met with Health Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, who was in Phoenix earlier this month. Voepel told Becerra that a widespread education campaign is needed to help staff and residents understand the benefits of the updated booster.
The Illinois Department of Public Health has initiated fines against 5 area long-term care facilities after determining violation of the Nursing Home Care Act during the third quarter of this year. The Alvin Eades Center located on West Michigan Avenue has received a Type A violation for not properly having a display of resident care policies, not properly having safeguards in place for infection control at the facility, not having proper records of vaccination of facility staff, and by “not having provided for services necessary to maintain each resident’s good physical health.”
SARS-CoV-2 vaccination is thought to protect nursing home residents, as it does the general population, but data are sparse because clinical trials were not conducted in nursing homes. Investigators linked data from a large community-based nursing home system and Veterans Health Administration (VHA) community living centers to assess the effect of vaccine boosting in long-term residents who had completed a two-dose series of mRNA vaccine and were eligible for a first booster from September to November 2021.