It’s been a calamitous couple of weeks for storm-battered skilled nursing operators and many of the dedicated people who work in them.
I was saddened, but not necessarily surprised, to learn over the holiday break that one of the dozens of victims of the Buffalo-area blizzard on Christmas weekend was a nursing home employee.
Anndel Taylor was on her way home from work on Dec. 23 when she became trapped in whiteout conditions just a few minutes from home. Stopped on the side of the road, she spent her last few hours sending increasingly worried texts to family members as first responders failed to make it to her location. Then her phone stopped working.
Though it’s that desperate seene that sticks in our psyche and pulls at our heartstrings, I’m guessing Taylor would rather be remembered by how she spent her last few hours in the career she was building. Though she would sadly die alone and in fear, Taylor spent her last shift helping to ensure her nursing home’s residents were neither.
A Go Fund Me account established by her family, hoping to bring her body home from New York to North Carolina, said 22-year-old Taylor worked as a certified nurse assistant at RCA at Aurora Park in East Aurora. She was a member of 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, which described her as a “dedicated caretaker.”
Her death, made all the more tragic by her age and the storm’s timing, is a grim reminder of the sacrifices nursing home staff routinely make on behalf of those in their care.
“It’s hitting our members hard, since others [initially caught in the snow on their way home from work] were able to get home,” Grace Bogdanove, SEIU vice president for the Western New York Nursing Home Division, told a labor publication. “As always, I am incredibly proud of our caregivers and the work they do, every day. … They didn’t get the chance to celebrate Christmas with their families. They stayed at work making sure their residents were cared for, and this is a consistent thing.”
As many of us enjoyed extended time off and caught up with our families, facilities all around the country were calling on their workers and emergency responders to help their residents get through a chaotic and, in some places, record-breaking storm.
Here in my part of Pennsylvania, as well as across the South and Northeast, there was a spate of burst pipes and exploding attic sprinkler lines in nursing homes resulting from extreme low temperatures through Christmas Day.
While many affected facilities were able to move residents to dry parts of their own buildings, others had to execute evacuation plans, and do so safely, in the bitter cold. In Maryland, four nursing home residents were transferred to area hospitals after a water pipe burst at their facility on Christmas Eve. In Tennessee, two residents had to be hospitalized for evaluation after a partial ceiling collapse due to flooding.
Not to be outdone, severe flooding in California’s Central Valley this past weekend forced the evacuation of at least one long-term care facility.
Nursing homes can’t prevent every storm they’ll face, especially when it comes to the ones driven by nature. But protecting residents and staff from the elements (even unexpected ones) should be a key focus of every emergency preparedness plan.
As safety experts have told me on multiple occasions: Make sure your workers know how to respond to broad scenarios, and run through them for practice, always remembering that you never know exactly what you’ll be up against when the real emergency hits. Smart processes are potentially more important than planning for specific events that may never happen.
One other thing you can do to prepare? Even in this time of shortages and stiff competition, insist on hiring folks who will show up — and stay on — in an emergency. Foster caring and commitment. Allowed to make the right connections with their charges and colleagues in an environment where their work is valued, nursing home staff have shown they will make the sacrifice time and again.
Let’s start off 2023 by honoring Anndel Taylor and the thousands like her who keep this sector going day in, day out, despite the challenges they face to do so.
Kimberly Marselas is McKnight’s Long-Term Care News Senior Editor.
Opinions expressed in McKnight’s Long-Term Care News columns are not necessarily those of McKnight’s.
