Kimberly Marselas

As I sat at the airport Tuesday morning for the first time since the pandemic began, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the unfairness of the past 15 months.

All around the globe, people accepted the many minor indignities of COVID-19 and struggled to cope with the greater losses, but certainly some nations and some groups of people have felt the pain more deeply.

It would be hard to argue that any group suffered — and in some cases, continues to suffer — more than U.S. nursing home residents.

Standing atop a parking garage watching the sun come up over Philadelphia, my life pretty much intact after all this time, there was no escaping the inequity of it all. The fact that I was about to board a full airplane put in stark relief complaints of residents and family members here in Pennsylvania.

This week, the Associated Press highlighted their anguish in an article titled “Protected them to death.” The take-down outlined how many nursing homes (including some in Pennsylvania, New York and Ohio) are still severely restricting visits and prohibiting residents from leaving their homes.

One family whose father wasn’t allowed to visit his son off campus said not being able to experience a change of scenery had led the 89-year-old resident to a “breaking point.”

After he finally got his chance to spend time outside at his son’s home and caught sight of a deer passing through the yard, Bob Greve told his son, “I don’t know how you got me out, but I’m so happy I could cry.”

Others told of similar experiences, painting nursing homes as a prison to be escaped.

While families remain rightfully up in arms about access to their loved ones, providers are seeing the number of COVID-related lawsuits creep and can’t help but be cognizant of liability concerns.

In many cases, facilities are following federal guidance that requires the suspension of visits when there is a new COVID-19 outbreak — even if that outbreak is just among staff. In others, providers faced with a high number of unvaccinated workers must be constantly worried about letting the virus back into the building with the addition of potentially unvaccinated guests.

While the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has said providers cannot require visitors to be vaccinated or request proof of vaccination, the agency has made no such pronouncements about staff. 

As any reader of this column knows, I am a supporter of mandated vaccination for healthcare workers. By late next week, we’ll know how far the nation’s nursing homes have come toward a 75% staff vaccination goal. My guess is that the national average will miss the mark, and in some geographic pockets and individual buildings, the number will remain astoundingly low.

TrilogyHealth Services, operator of 110 skilled nursing and senior living facilities in Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio, has a 70% vaccination rate among staff and residents. The company recently mandated COVID-19 shots as a condition of employment to drive those numbers higher.

“Our servant leadership culture encourages each of us to make decisions that not only benefit ourselves, but the people around us — because they’re our family,” the company said on its website. 

If you sympathize with men like Bob Greve, I encourage you to do more to keep indoor visits possible and to expand their rights to off-premise trips and overnights. If other strategies haven’t moved your employees, it’s time to find a new way to make them realize their role in protecting residents. Let’s shift the burden away from isolated residents.

After all, each of us deserves the freedom to move about our own world, airplane or no, no matter how big that world is.

Kimberly Marselas is senior editor of McKnight’s Long-Term Care News.