Staffing will be “key” for post-acute care providers in the coming weeks, especially during an expected surge of residents recovering from the novel 2019 coronavirus, experts say in a new viewpoint article published in JAMA

“The US has been playing catch-up in its COVID-19 response in terms of testing, social isolation and hospital capacity,”  wrote researchers David Grabowski, Ph.D., and Karen Joynt Maddox, MD, MPH. 

“Making changes in post-acute care delivery and policy today could help contribute to having adequate capacity and capability in the coming weeks and months.”

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The well of long-term care residents likely will result from efforts to free up hospital beds, increasing the need for post-acute care services. The researchers argued that providers will need to ensure they have the capacity and capability to safety treat COVID-19 patients as they transition into other settings. 

Once this happens, the experts suggested a good practice would be to test every patient being discharged for COVID-19, regardless of what they were treated for at the hospital. Recovering patients will need specialized post-acute care environments that will ensure proper treatment for their conditions, along with appropriate equipment and training for staff members. 

“These specialized environments could potentially take several forms. One approach would be to dedicate certain post-acute care facilities in each market to be ‘centers of excellence’ specializing in — and exclusively assuming — the care of patients recovering from COVID-19. Because these organizations would only care for these patients, the risk of infecting other patients could be minimized,” they wrote. 

They added that “staffing will be key” to appropriately handling the increase in residents. The authors called on policy makers to ensure paid sick leave for workers and to adopt a higher Medicaid pay rate for providers. Such moves would help incentive workers and facilities to take on the increased caseload, while also giving them resources to provide high-quality care. 

“Staff must have the requisite training and personal protective equipment to treat patients recovering from COVID-19 safely,” they wrote. “Staff will need to be tested regularly to ensure that they are not spreading the virus. And additional staff may need to be recruited to perform lower-skilled tasks that can be acquired relatively quickly, perhaps in part from industries that will experience major layoffs in the near term.”