This is a topic that comes up every winter among my acquaintances because local facilities (ALs) are closed during respiratory outbreaks (I believe the threshold is more than 3 active cases), usually for weeks at a time but sometimes for months. That means visits are discouraged, all group activities are cancelled and in some cases congregate dining is as well, more or less amounting to house arrest for some of the people living there who don't have the ability to leave the site. I've never seen any complaints here on the forum about this and I'm curious, is this common where you live? If not what is done differently?
I cannot in my worst nightmares envision a facility that would ban visits and confine residents to their room for an extended period of time. Months? Unimaginable! Let me tell you, the residents of my mother’s nursing home would mutiny! Many of them, including my mother, are fairly spunky! I also could not imagine not being able to check on my mother’s welfare. Part of what keeps any elder care facility on its toes are regular visits from family and friends. My mother would be one of those residents mentioned in earlier posts who is unable to Skype or FaceTime and can’t use a phone either, though she can communicate somewhat if someone else makes the call for her. Even then, she is at times unintelligible. I am glad a shutdown has never happened where she lives. I have to have eyes on to make sure she is OK.
Memory Care, on the other hand, is different. They cannot have a 'lock down' situation b/c the residents do not understand that they can't come out of their rooms, so it doesn't happen. At least at the 2 MCs I'm associated with. Life goes on as usual, visiting is discouraged, and the disease runs its course. At the MC I work at, there has been an outbreak of a stomach flu so far this year which has affected about 60% of the residents. Food is served on disposable plates/forks etc. during the outbreak.
All illness outbreaks must be reported to the State for all of the ALFs and MCs I've been involved with.
The facility I mentioned earlier that had one or two new cases almost as soon as the old ones were cleared, resulting in weeks and months of restrictions
And staff who are over zealous and try to prevent ALL outside contact for ANY reason
Underlying this is the niggling reality that some of these people are in their final months of life, and they are paying a high financial price for services that are not being delivered as promised. I find that troubling.
I thought these were reasonable safe guards. There were never more than 4 residents in my father's MC wing (out of 32-34) ill at once and no one died from illness or its complications. The staff didn't have much illness and that was very important to being able to maintain good care for the residents. My father had the flu once and the MC required an extra "half" attendant (1 attendant for 2 residents) during the 3 days of his acute illness and an extra cleaning fee when he recovered (I was surprised his supplemental insurance covered the extra fees). Generally, I dropped things off for my father, spoke to the staff and to my father over the phone and didn't physically visit him much during restricted visitation. I was as concerned about bringing illness home as taking some illness into the MC.
The consensus is that most places have closed facilities for much of the winter, and everyone is OK with that.
Thank You
If this is in existence now, it might be because staff and/or Admins are worried b/c of the Coronavirus and its rapid and extensive transmission.
I do think it's unfair to patients and relatives though; both need that interaction, and masks can be worn.
I think what's more appropriate is to handle the situation as hospitals do, by quarantining only select rooms, or wings, where the infectious patients are.
What I question is locking down the whole place and banishing healthy people to virtual house arrest, especially when the number of people affected low. I really believe that staff showing up for work when they are sick and/or moving from room to room taking shortcuts with quarantine protocols (which I observed first hand) is a much more likely vector of transmission.
Dad had therapy and meals in a private room (the best part), and the segregation was actually not long. I don't remember how many days but I don't think it lasted more than a week.
And fortunately, it wasn't something like Coronavirus!
Something that has also come up for discussion is that cleaning staff are not being allowed into the rooms either, so for one local facility it has been over 6 weeks without cleaning - not good when many AL residents have incontinence and some degree of dementia too.
Infection control is definitely important, but despite best efforts this kind of thing is going to happen.