Here are four stories on issues facing long-term care and what leaders should keep in mind.
Support Needed to Ensure Well-Being of Long-Term Care Aides
A study from the University of Alberta looked at the how the first year of the pandemic affected long-term care aides in nursing homes. Nursing homes were the hardest hit in the early months of the pandemic, with many frontline workers struggling with staffing issues due to high turnover and burnout.
Prior to the pandemic, the study said, care aides were already considered high risk for poor mental health and job dissatisfaction. The compounding distress of the staffing shortage, increased workloads, and not being able to properly process a patient's death from COVID-19 put them at even more risk.
Read more about ways leaders can support their care aides' mental health and well-being.
The Case for Improving Long-Term Care Services Navigation
As a growing population of older adults enter the healthcare infrastructure, its crucial that they have the resources to find and coordinate the care they need. A national survey found that 53% of adults 50 and older felt anxious while trying to select long-term care, and only 24% felt confident in their decision.
"Many families reckon with a long-term care system that's nearly impossible to navigate and provides little-to-no support for families making life-and-death decisions," Caroline Peterson, senior vice president at NORC, the institution that conducted the study, said. "Most people will eventually have to make decisions about long-term care for ourselves or a family member, so creating a consumer-friendly long-term care navigation system should be high up on the nation's list of to-dos."
Read on to learn how long-term care leaders can take these findings and be part of the solution.
CMS Hones in on Underperforming Nursing Homes With Tougher Oversight
Keeping with the Biden-Harris administration's mission to improve the safety and quality of nursing homes, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced it will increase its monitoring of facilities with poor performance through a series of revisions to the Special Focus Facility (SFF) Program.
Eighty-eight nursing homes participate in the program, which was created to help them improve compliance and quality, but some facilities haven't been able to graduate out of the program with the necessary standard or they fail to sustain compliance.
Learn what the four revisions to the SFF program are to help improve quality and safety.
Staffing, Regulatory Requirements Top Challenges for Facility-Based Post-Acute Care
In a recent report by KLAS Research, it noted the challenges facing the facility-based post-acute care market, which included staffing, employee burnout, competing with staffing firms in the job market, and managing intensive patient care for severe COVID-19 cases.
Technology could be a solution to help with these challenges. The report addresses this more.