The White House on Monday announced a plan to send 18 million more rapid COVID-19 tests from manufacturer Abbott to nursing homes over the coming weeks, as part of a larger move to ship 150 million of the units across the country in an attempt to reopen schools and businesses. Of that total, 50 million […]
A federal working group this week released a new report outlining how nursing homes and other long-term care facilities should marshal limited resources during future COVID-19 outbreaks and other public health crises. As operators stare down the fall flu season and the continued risk of coronavirus spread, leaders should focus on identifying the top challenges […]
The rate of false positive results from point-of-care COVID-19 testing units sent to nursing homes has not been higher than anticipated, a top federal official in charge of the program asserted Friday. “The last thing you said is wrong, that it was in excess of expectation,” Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) assistant health […]
A grand jury in Massachusetts indicted a pair of former nursing home leaders on criminal neglect charges related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The New York Times, among other outlets, initially reported the news Friday. Bennett Walsh and David Clinton face five counts apiece in the wake of 76 coronavirus deaths at the Holyoke Soldiers’ Home, […]
The federal government late last week released a more detailed set of reporting rules for health care providers that received COVID-19 relief through a variety of stimulus programs, while also affirming that leftover cash can be spent into the new year. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) over this past weekend unveiled the […]
The federal government’s sweeping new rules requiring nursing home visitations in most cases generally usurp state-developed requirements, a top official confirmed this week, but Washington is continuing to work with state governments to iron out any significant areas of conflict. “Generally speaking, state guidelines cannot conflict with federal requirements,” Evan Shulman, director of the Centers […]
About a quarter of nursing homes have seen at least one false positive COVID-19 result during an ongoing federal push to provide point-of-care antigen testing at most facilities across the country, according to an industry-led survey. “We found that about 20-25 percent of SNFs had a positive antigen test result later found to be incorrect […]
Under regulations instituted as a result of the COVID-19 public health emergency, skilled nursing facilities are reporting a wealth of information to the federal government — on top of all the information they were required to submit pre-pandemic. And that information could end up being the guiding light for the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) […]
For Melody Taylor Stark, navigating life after her husband Bill required long-term nursing care hasn’t always been easy, but with the help of some caring staffers and a little bit of creativity, the couple was able to settle into something like normalcy. Friday nights out at a restaurant became takeout shared over a table that […]
The federal government this week released its exact framework for distributing $2 billion in relief funding to nursing facilities that can reduce COVID-19 infections and deaths. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will begin sending out payments to qualifying operators next month based on September performance, with three more monthly performance periods through […]
The federal government on Thursday issued a new set of nursing home visitation guidelines, laying out a roadmap for resuming indoor visits based on community COVID-19 spread and emphasizing the importance of meeting residents’ psychosocial needs. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) unveiled the new recommendations in a memo to directors of State […]
A White House task force this week released an exhaustive report detailing the struggles and failures that the nation’s nursing workers and residents have endured over the last six months, but there wasn’t much information in its 186 pages that should have come as a surprise to anyone following the space. A coherent, coordinated, and […]
A special federal commission on nursing homes and COVID-19 on Wednesday released its formal report, focusing foremost on testing, personal protective equipment, and visitation as the nation’s long-term care facilities continue to grapple with the novel coronavirus. The Coronavirus Commission for Safety and Quality in Nursing Homes laid out 27 primary recommendations for the Centers […]
Becton Dickinson, which manufactures one of two point-of-care COVID-19 testing models that the federal government has sent directly to nursing homes, is investigating claims of false positives in the long-term care setting, the Wall Street Journal reported this week. The American Health Care Association, which represents more than 14,000 primarily for-profit nursing facilities across the […]
The federal government this week opened a public comment period on a proposed new quality metric that would measure each nursing home’s ability to curb the spread of infections. The Skilled Nursing Facility (SNF) Healthcare-Associated Infections (HAIs) Requiring Hospitalizations measure would track the rate of nursing home stays that result in acquired infections — specifically […]
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to cast a pall on interactions across the U.S., the social needs of residents of skilled nursing facilities are mounting by the day. Many of them have been in various states of lockdown since March, when the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) implemented a ban on all unnecessary […]
Six months into the coronavirus crisis, the nation has settled into an uneasy return to semi-normalcy, with many schools reopening, sports airing on television every night, and most people learning to live with socializing in small groups while wearing masks and keeping plenty of distance. But for nursing home residents already ravaged by COVID-19, any […]
Nursing home leaders should document all attempts to test workers for COVID-19 under strict new rules, officials said this week, as the federal government looks to balance enforcement with the reality of continued hurdles on the ground. “We want to ensure that we’re using enforcement discretion. We know that as we’re implementing this, there’s going […]
The federal government will release approximately 750,000 point-of-care COVID-19 tests from manufacturer Abbott to nursing homes next week in a separate, parallel initiative that builds on a previously announced push to bring coronavirus tests directly to facilities’ doors. Initially positioned as a way to ramp up testing in schools, a Department of Health and Human […]
Even though the federal government has released the full details behind the most recent $5 billion tranche of aid for nursing homes, set to last through December, operators shouldn’t necessarily think that the support will end there. Citing $50 billion still left in the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) coronavirus relief coffers, American […]
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