McKnight's November 16, 2020
Because of the devastation COVID-19 has wrought on nursing homes, regulatory changes likely are coming, according to a highly respected long-term care researcher.
“I think we’re going to see some big, big changes going forward,” said David Grabowski, Ph.D., a professor of healthcare policy at Harvard Medical School. He was the opening day keynote speaker Friday for the virtual conference of the National Association for the Support of Long Term Care (NASL).
The plethora of pandemic-related problems — among them, the exorbitant number of resident and staff deaths, resident loneliness due to shutdowns, and low occupancy rates and hospital admission rates — has revealed underlying systemic problems, Grabowski said. These include: low Medicaid payments, inadequate pay for staffing, an ineffective...