Happy to live in New Jersey (Newark, Jersey City: apartment complexes, transfer to, safe area)
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So if there were no minimums set for nurses and nurses aides, you’d have resident’s lying in poop for 2 hours instead of 40 minutes.
But regarding Covid, the biggest problems were that they waited too long to ban visitors and quarantine residents, and the lack of PPE. Dining rooms, activities and hairdressers should have been closed very early on. Nurses aides, who go in and out of 10 to 15 patients rooms all day long, were being given one mask to wear for an entire week in many cases.
If they had had more time to prepare, I think it would’ve been very different. They would have had time to rearrange residents so that they could create a quarantine section. This would have, along with all residents being quarantined and having dedicated nursing just for that wing, severely limited the infection. It’s always easier to formulate a plan when you can see what others did wrong in hindsight. It’s tough to go first and this was especially true with Covid.
i dont think that the staff minimums keeps patients from lying in poop. id have to get more info on this matter from someone who operates a nursing home but i would expect they would say that the minimums are sometimes too high (or maybe in a time of emergency waiving the minimums could help meet the needs during a period of emergency). if service isnt good, someone could always complain to DOH. that could happen with or without appropriate staffing levels.
i dont disagree with what you are saying and im not requiring penalties for those that may have made bad decisions. i am just curious if bad decisions were made and if there were better options available to them at the time. it seems like it was known that forcing nursing homes to accept the patients would be a disaster. i am not certain that alternative options werent there.
baloney with the excuses. We didn't know much about Covid but we did know with absolute certainty it was incredibly contagious and deadly. So what do you do -- put them among those most vulnerable?
C'mon, quit with the excuses for Murphy and Cuomo's poor judgement that killed a lot of people that didn't need to die.
i dont think that the staff minimums keeps patients from lying in poop. id have to get more info on this matter from someone who operates a nursing home but i would expect they would say that the minimums are sometimes too high (or maybe in a time of emergency waiving the minimums could help meet the needs during a period of emergency). if service isnt good, someone could always complain to DOH. that could happen with or without appropriate staffing levels.
i dont disagree with what you are saying and im not requiring penalties for those that may have made bad decisions. i am just curious if bad decisions were made and if there were better options available to them at the time. it seems like it was known that forcing nursing homes to accept the patients would be a disaster. i am not certain that alternative options werent there.
The minimums are very low. Often one aide has 10-15 patients. It’s very low pay with frequent call outs. So if they have 3 aides on a floor with 13 patients each, and one calls out, the other two will have to split her patients. They are allowed to understaff in an “emergency” basis which some homes take advantage of. If it takes 25 minutes to bathe, clean, dress a patient and get them out of bed, the last few people might not be cleaned and up till lunchtime. You have one nurse giving out meds to 35 people. There’s no time for anything else. The staffing levels are horrible. The minimums set are not high enough for good quality care. It doesn’t do any good to complain because it’s pretty much across the board now.
My mom is currently in Jefferson Care Center for rehab, a facility that’s part of Jefferson Health and connected with the hospital. You’d think care would be good. But when I picked up her laundry last week one of her nightgowns was completely covered in poop up to the neck. Do you have any idea how long you have to be laying in poop before it works it’s way out of the diaper and up to your upper body? A long time.
The homes probably would say the minimums hurt, but taking them away would result in third world level care. I worked for 6 months in a home in Houston once. Texas is a low regulated state. That home was far worse than the worse places I’ve been in in NJ, in fact it probably would have been closed by the state here. I had two patients who hadn’t been out of bed in years because they didn’t have enough high back wheelchairs. One was relatively young. So while loosening regulations might be good for business, it’s not so good for patients.
why couldnt they have been put on navy ships or hotels? also, i believe there was hospital capacity so the hospitals would just not be able to discharge them. the regulations could have been relaxed so hospitals wouldnt have had to staff those wings as much as they are typically required to. people involved in new york knew what was going to happen and im sure the government did also. all these healthcare providers are heavily regulated so if the government wants to regulate so much then let them come up with the solution and take the blame if there are failures.
i havent really looked into what other states did to avoid the issue (or maybe they had more time to prepare nursing homes since ny/nj got hit first).
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Originally Posted by ocnjgirl
The Navy ships had cots. No way an elderly person who has been hospitalized for any extended period could have been on a cot. Even on her best day my mother couldn't get on a cot, let alone after an extended illness. They need electric beds so their heads could be elevated, both for respiratory purposes, feeding (any elderly that was on a vent probably came out with swallowing problems, some probably on feeding tubes) and to raise the bed to stand them. They need to be turned to avoid pressure ulcers, can't do that on a cot. They need therapy, speech, OT and PT, if you wait too long in that age they will never get their function back. They need a dietician and a kitchen that can puree their food, they need CNAs to change diapers, Hoyer (mechanical lifts) to get them out of bed (again, you keep a 94 year old in bed for weeks and they might never stand up again). They need to be watched 24/7 to make sure they don't try to get up (remember many have varying degrees of dementia, but even the ones who didn't will be confused simply due to the trauma of the hospital, etc). They need alarms on the beds in case they try to get up, and people close by enough to get there in time to stop them. They need call bells. They need all kinds of specialized care that the ships did not have and were not equipped to provide.
Yes, I think other states had the benefit of more time to prepare.
Wait a minute, people. Navy ships were NEVER going to take on ANY people with COVID. That was completely against anything the military would agree to, obviously from a defense point of view. They would only take people who were negative for COVID and even then there were other subgroups of medical conditions that they would not accept.
Wait a minute, people. Navy ships were NEVER going to take on ANY people with COVID. That was completely against anything the military would agree to, obviously from a defense point of view. They would only take people who were negative for COVID and even then there were other subgroups of medical conditions that they would not accept.
As of April 6,2020 the hospital ship USNS Comfort,docked at New York's pier 90,and the US Army hospital at the Jacob K.Javits Center,began accepting COVID-19 patients.
These two facilities alone provided 1500+ fully staffed and equipped beds that could have been used to care for convalescing COVID-19 patients.
In the month that the USNS Comfort was in New York there was only a TOTAL of 182 patients admitted to the ship's hospital,of which only 70% were COVID-19 patients. The Javits Center hospital was also greatly underutilized and never reached 40% of capacity.
The earliest outbreak and deaths due to COVID-19 in this country occurred at a nursing home in Kirkland,Washington.So right from the get go it was known that nursing homes were terribly vulnerable to the virus.
With unused hospital beds available elsewhere,it's unfathomable how Murphy & Cuomo could decide to order inadequately equipped nursing homes to admit known COVID-19 patients.
With all the problems in California right now aren't you glad that you are living in New Jersey?
Although we are not at the level of the tyrannical State of California, the way New Jersey voters have decided to go forward falls within the same political spectrum. As a result, it is just a matter of time until we get there. Case in point, an increase in gas tax starting October 1st and now they are proposing a tax on stock trades which is the reason why NYSE, NASDAQ, and others are conducting tests to switch servers and move out of the State. Again these are simple illustrations. Once these taxes are imposed, although they claim that it is because of Covid-19, we all know that once the economy is back to as normal as it can possibly be, these taxes will NOT go away. If anything, they will continue to hammer its constituents with higher rates and new taxes.....I'm personally not that optimistic. As someone mentioned here, people vote with their feet.
Although we are not at the level of the tyrannical State of California, the way New Jersey voters have decided to go forward falls within the same political spectrum. As a result, it is just a matter of time until we get there. Case in point, an increase in gas tax starting October 1st and now they are proposing a tax on stock trades which is the reason why NYSE, NASDAQ, and others are conducting tests to switch servers and move out of the State. Again these are simple illustrations. Once these taxes are imposed, although they claim that it is because of Covid-19, we all know that once the economy is back to as normal as it can possibly be, these taxes will NOT go away. If anything, they will continue to hammer its constituents with higher rates and new taxes.....I'm personally not that optimistic. As someone mentioned here, people vote with their feet.
The gas tax is actually required due to a bill signed by last administration requiring a certain dollar amount from gas revenues yearly for road projects. The bill stipulates that they must make that dollar amount and they didn’t get it because so many less people were driving in spring. The way it is written, they do not have a choice.
You are aware Christie raised gas taxes by 23 cents a gallon?
Neither of those articles provide any alternative solutions either though. Again, as someone with 20+ years of nursing home therapy, I can't imagine where else those people could have been sent.
If DeBlasio/Cuomo and Murphy for that matter (monkey see - monkey do) are able to move an army of homeless people to Hotels and pay for sanctuary cities/states benefits to illegals; and a myriad of other senseless and costly endeavors, I'm sure they could have asked their army of useless Government advisers where to put them "SAFELY".
The gas tax is actually required due to a bill signed by last administration requiring a certain dollar amount from gas revenues yearly for road projects. The bill stipulates that they must make that dollar amount and they didn’t get it because so many less people were driving in spring. The way it is written, they do not have a choice.
You are aware Christie raised gas taxes by 23 cents a gallon?
The Gas tax was signed by the last Administration to offset the Sales & Use tax which Murphy has stated to repeal are you aware of that? There has been two increases since its insertion. So when does it stop? If people drive less, then Local and State authorities have the fiduciary duty to assess its resources. There is something called cost allocation and related depreciation costs on fixed assets which these projects are part of. Where by you would reduce the amount of maintenance costs since the related tear and wear has to correlate to the amount of revenue generated. But since we don't hold these people accountable, they continue to push the pedal to the medal rather than reassess spending and reconstruct budgets.
If DeBlasio/Cuomo and Murphy for that matter (monkey see - monkey do) are able to move an army of homeless people to Hotels and pay for sanctuary cities/states benefits to illegals; and a myriad of other senseless and costly endeavors, I'm sure they could have asked their army of useless Government advisers where to put them "SAFELY".
Again, hindsight is 20/20. And there really were no alternatives that I can see. A hotel would not have worked as I’ve explained. Most of these facilities already had residents with Covid in any case. They just did not go to the hospital. My mothers assisted living had 13 positive residents at one point, and they stayed there the entire time with the exception of 3 that were sent out to hospital and later died. They did not get Covid from outside residents coming in to the facility, they got it from visitors and other outsiders which the facility failed to ban until it was too late. So it wasn’t like these facilities were Covid free until people came out of the hospitals and were sent back.
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