COVID-19 Plagued California Nursing Homes had Past Problems
It was the first time he had seen her since California nursing homes shut their doors to visitors a month earlier. Immediately after the video chat, Newbery called the front desk in a panic.
“I said, ‘You gotta get her out, you gotta call 911,’” he recalled. “She’s looking like she’s about to die.”
Newbery’s mother was living at the Rehabilitation Center of Santa Monica, one of 198 nursing homes in California where at least one patient had contracted the coronavirus as of April 28, public health records show. The outbreak at the Rehabilitation Center has been worse than most, with 12 employees and 24 patients infected, including nine fatalities, according to the Los Angeles County health department.
The Rehabilitation Center shares several other worrisome characteristics with many other homes beset by coronavirus infections: Historically, it has had lower-than-average staffing levels and a record of not always following basic staffing and infection control rules, a Kaiser Health News analysis shows.
Compared with homes reporting no patient infections, California facilities with one or more patients with a COVID-19 case had on average a 25% fewer registered nurses per resident in the final three months of 2019, the last period for which the federal government has published data.
In addition, 91% of nursing homes reporting at least one case of the virus had a previous health violation for not following infection control rules, while 81% of homes without reported cases had such violations. Typical violations included nurses or aides not washing their hands or wearing protective clothing around potentially contagious patients.
“With low RN staffing, it is not surprising that these facilities have had previous violations for infection control and poorer overall quality as measured by having more deficiencies,” said Charlene Harrington, a professor emerita of the School of Nursing at the University of California-San Francisco. “It is a classic situation that reaffirms what researchers have found previously, only the situation with the COVID-19 virus is far more serious than anything the nursing homes have experienced before.”
In an email, Jeffrey Huang, the administrator of the Rehabilitation Center of Santa Monica, said “we respectfully and strongly disagree” that Medicare assessments of the home’s quality predict or reflect the nursing home’s efforts to protect residents from the coronavirus. The staff was “continuing to do everything possible for keeping our residents and staff safe in these uncertain times,” Huang wrote. He declined to discuss Newbery, citing patient confidentiality.
Nursing homes have emerged as one of the places the coronavirus spreads most aggressively. In California, 4,711 nursing home residents had been infected and 663 had died by the end of April, about a third of all COVID-19-linked deaths that homes in the state have reported to authorities.
KHN
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