In "American Eldercide," Margaret Morganroth Gullette discusses how ageism coupled with understaffing led to significant neglect and a high toll on nursing home residents during the COVID-19 pandemic. Gullette explains that understaffing created severe conditions, with inadequate care resulting in pressure ulcers, falls, and infections long before the pandemic. The pandemic worsened these issues as policies allowed infected patients to be sent to already vulnerable nursing homes. Gullette's work calls for a shift in policy, urging for mandated higher staffing standards to protect these residents from further harm.
Anguished family members, overworked aides, and indignant reformers had long suspected that many owners achieved profits by keeping staffing lean, a practice that inevitably overworks the remaining employees and leads to mistreatment of the captive audience.
Understaffing leads to neglected turning; poor skin care leads to pressure ulcers, grinding pain, sepsis, even death. Delays in responding to calls lead to falls and broken bones.
Understaffing also leads to infections, a main source of misery, pain, and death long before COVID. CMS needed to mandate, not merely 'urge,' higher standards.
The walls of protection that should have kept COVID outside...had been made porous—by governors who ordered hospitals to send patients with the virus to the ill-prepared nursing facilities.
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