The article addresses the quality of care in nursing homes and, specifically, the way care was organized during the pandemic. The law states that all residents of nursing homes must be provided with timely and adequate care, while the policy of nursing homes should be directed at risk mitigation. However, due to numerous problems such as staff shortages, redundancy or absence of necessary medical equipment, personnel burnout, and lack of effective control, the quality of care is often poor. The issue of poor medical care at nursing homes became especially relevant in the COVID pandemic when many residents died due to negligence and lack of medication.
The plaintiff in the article is June Morrison, the daughter of former resident George Morrison, who died due to COVID he got while staying at Southbridge Care Homes in Ontario. The defendant is Southbridge Care Homes in Ontario itself. The argument presented in the article is that poor care and inadequate policy of Southbridge Care Homes led to the drastic increase of COVID cases within this institution leading to George Morrison’s death. The plaintiff says that her father’s first symptoms of COVID were disregarded; moreover, the nursing home has inadequate preventive measures at its facility (Katawazi, 2020). The family was not notified about the deceased’s state until it got considerably worse and they could not provide alternative treatment to the patient.
The results of this case may help to significantly improve the quality of healthcare within nursing homes. First of all, the human recourse issue should be considered as nursing homes are often understaffed and lack human recourses with professional knowledge to identify the start of many deceases, COVID-19 in this particular case (Armstrong, P. & Armstrong, H., 2020). Employing more professional nurses would allow nursing homes to install more effective systems of disease spread prevention as well as to take better care of their residents in terms of treatment and risk mitigation. Secondly, strategic planning at nursing homes could be significantly improved. Indeed, a separate wing could be ascribed to those patients who show COVID-positive results when tested in hospitals, mitigating the risk of infection. Thirdly, operational practices of healthcare in nursing homes may be significantly improved. Thus, it would be beneficial if all residents received a daily checkup on their health to reveal the onset of infectious or other life-threatening diseases and states. Moreover, timely communication with relatives should become a common practice at nursing homes allowing children to execute some form of control over the quality of healthcare their parents receive.
To implement the above-mentioned decisions in my practice, I would employ more nursing staff in the facilities under my care. I believe the staff-to-patient ratio in nursing homes should be significantly increased since the residents of nursing homes, as a rule, are unable to take adequate care of themselves. This could be done through partnerships with hospitals where hospital staff is invited to identify and tackle problems in nursing homes’ healthcare environment (Stall et al., 2020). Such partnerships allow for identifying medical equipment shortages and supplying the emergency provisions of medical care on a timely and adequate basis (Stall et al., 2020). Furthermore, I would see to it that patient routing is improved. Those patients from hospitals or future residents that are admitted to nursing home facilities with signs of infectious disease, including COVID, should be separated from all other residents. Ideally, a separate wing or department should be instituted for these people where they can be tested before being admitted to nursing facilities. I would introduce regular communication with relatives who may provide insights into the specific healthcare needs of the residents, especially those with Alzheimer’s and dementia diseases.
References
Armstrong, P., & Armstrong, H. (2020). Chapter Five: Contracting-Out Care: Nursing Homes in Canada. In Navigating Private and Public Healthcare (pp. 87-103). Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore.
Katawazi, M. (2020). Another million-dollar lawsuit filed against Ontario’s worst-hit nursing home for alleged neglect.CTV News. Web.
Stall, N. M., Farquharson, C., Fan‐Lun, C., Wiesenfeld, L., Loftus, C. A., Kain, D.,… & Mahtani, R. (2020). A hospital partnership with a nursing home experiencing a COVID‐19 outbreak: description of a multiphase emergency response in Toronto, Canada.Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 68(7), 1376-1381. Web.