During the darkest days of the pandemic, Buffy Lloyd-Krejci, DrPH, CIC, traveled to nursing homes across the US to assess their infection control practices and help them adopt protective strategies. What she saw — too little PPE, missing basics like hand sanitizing stations, and distracting and “nitpicky” regulatory obligations and penalties — led her to write “Broken: How the Global Pandemic Uncovered a Nursing Home System in Need of Repair and the Heroic Staff Fighting for Change.”
COVID-19, Lloyd-Krejci says, “cracked open an understanding of how real the problem is” when it comes to outbreak preparedness. Will nursing homes be ready when the next one hits?
In this episode, Lloyd-Krejci and McKnight’s Long-Term Care News Senior Editor Kimberly Marselas discuss the lessons learned from the pandemic, whether they’ll be forgotten as COVID eases, and what policymakers and facilities themselves can do to ensure nursing homes remain safe for residents and staff.
