More than half of long-stay nursing home residents enrolled in hospice did not receive any visits from hospice aides from April through December 2020, a new study has found.
The findings highlight one facet of the vast disruptions in care delivery during the pandemic, investigators say.
The researchers compared hospice aide visits during the first nine months of 2020 to the same months in 2019. Each cohort consisted of approximately 150,000 residents.
Among the residents who did receive at least one monthly hospice aide visit from March to September 2020, the per-resident-per-month visit minutes were lower than the same months in 2019. The biggest difference was a 2.6-hour drop in visit time in April, reported study lead Xiao (Joyce) Wang, PhD, of Brown University School of Public Health, Providence, RI.
The number of days residents received hospice in a month or the nursing homes’ COVID-19 exposure status did not seem to affect the pattern of decreased minutes, Wang and colleagues noted.
Aides play a big role hospice care, with frequent visits nearing residents’ end of life. They develop strong rapport with residents, which may be critical to the residents’ well-being. This was particularly critical when visitation was curtailed during the pandemic, the researchers wrote.
In addition, the loss of hospice aide insights as their visits decreased likely had an impact on hospice nurses’ assessments during the pandemic, the researchers theorized. They also noted anecdotal reports from hospice providers about the negative effects from loss of physical touch typically provided during such in-person care or by family members.
“Our findings highlight the toll of the pandemic on hospice care delivery in nursing homes and the need for hospice care to be better incorporated into emergency preparedness planning,” they concluded.
The study, including a state-level analysis of factors that may have contributed to the reduced presence of hospice aides was published April 2 in JAMDA.
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