A new scholarship program aims to boost the number of home health care workers in Vermont. The shortage of direct care nursing staff in Vermont has made it nearly impossible to find enough in-home support, so several Departments within the Department of Disabilities, Aging and Independent Living have developed a new program to attract health care workers.
Over the last decade, an aging American population has increasingly turned away from nursing homes in favor of trained caregivers who can provide critical help in the home with basic daily tasks. But a new investigation warns the need for at-home care has vastly outpaced a much smaller growth in the pool of home care workers. The result: between 2013 and 2019, the number of available home care workers for every 100 patients in need has fallen by nearly 12%.
Nursing shortages, a prevalent problem across the health care industry, have hit home care particularly hard. Compared to the hospital or office environment, caring for complex patients in their home requires an unusual skillset that is not as easily replaced. During the height of the COVID-19 crisis, home care nurses heroically delivered care, including vaccines, to isolated, homebound patients. Unfortunately, now nurses are leaving home care in greater numbers for better-paying jobs in other parts of the health care system, and many are leaving Massachusetts altogether for areas where housing is less expensive.
The Blue Mountain Hospital District Board of Directors voted unanimously on Wednesday, April 26, to move ahead with a restructuring of its home health services program over the objections of the program’s director and others. An eight-person committee of hospital district personnel, including CEO Cam Marlowe and Sylvia Ross, director of Blue Mountain Home Health and Hospice, has been studying a plan to increase insurance reimbursement for the cost of providing home health services.
The closure of Hughes Health & Rehabilitation in West Hartford is partly due to a shift to home and community-based services, its owner said. Over the last few weeks, as he waited for the state Department of Social Services to approve his application to close Hughes, he and his staff have been helping the residents still there find new homes. The building’s closure is in part a consequence of a statewide shift to home and community-based services, Flaxman has said, and in part due to declining occupancy and swelling costs.
A southern Iowa nursing home that’s owned in part by a man accused of defrauding taxpayers has been cited for 19 regulatory violations. One of the alleged violations that state inspectors recently uncovered at Prestige Care Center in Fairfield involves a nurse who, according to state records, openly diluted a patient’s morphine with tap water to compensate for the portion of narcotic that was missing. According to state records, the incident occurred last September after a medication aide questioned a registered nurse about a shortage of liquid morphine painkiller that had been prescribed for one specific resident.