The coronavirus vaccine has shown powerful protective qualities when medical scientists scrutinized its large-scale results in real life. It has demonstrated great potency in safeguarding kids ages 12-15, in early test results from the shots’ makers. The inoculation appears to be lasting, ensuring patients for at least six months after did not suffer serious infection….
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U.S. nursing-home rating system ‘broken’ by gamed data and poor oversight
Federal regulators, by allowing owners and operators to self-report quality and safety data and failing to audit vital information with diligence, have “broken” the national nursing-home rating system — what was supposed to be an invaluable tool for consumers to make life-and-death decisions about where to place vulnerable loved ones needing round-the-clock care. Instead, the….
Continue ReadingNursing homes’ lethal health-staffing problem: Churn rates as high as 300%
Churn may be a wonderful word when discussing fresh milk, heavy cream, and butter. But it can be a nightmare term for the too-common, rapid, and lethal turnover that occurs in health staff at nursing homes and other long-term care facilities. Personnel turnover left the aged, injured, and ailing residents at care centers, with an….
Continue ReadingAs virus threat eases, alarms sound on hedge funds owning nursing homes
Just as good news expands about vaccines and declining coronavirus cases and deaths in the nation’s nursing homes and other long-term care facilities, grim information also is developing on how the facilities’ ownership, particularly by wealthy investors, can be lethal to residents. The positive effects of early efforts to get vulnerable long-term care residents and….
Continue ReadingU.S. seeks to boost vaccine supply and use. Why wasn’t this done already?
As coronavirus vaccine supplies keep far exceeding demand, and as the new administration races to acquire and distribute more doses, as well as to kick start plodding vaccination campaigns across the country, it may be a challenge not to ask the people who oversaw battling the pandemic before: What the heck were you thinking? More on….
Continue ReadingWhen end-of-life wishes get ignored, courts see another kind of malpractice
Many Americans took a good step for themselves and their loved ones after getting shocked by learning about treatments, like prolonged machine ventilation, that coronavirus patients may undergo. Not for me, the healthy may have decided. They committed to determining end-of-life wishes, committing these to “advance directives” or POLST (portable orders for life-sustaining treatment) forms. That….
Continue ReadingPandemic exposes how push for profits can imperil nursing home residents
Nursing home owners and operators have pleaded “poor us” through a lethal 2020. But profit-seeking players in the industry clearly still see rapacious opportunity in long-term care facilities — with residents suffering the consequences. NPR and the Washington Post both have dug into the results when investment groups or chains acquire and operate nursing homes,….
Continue ReadingAuld Lang Syne’s melancholy? This go-around it may be a tragic, viral dirge
As the nation closes out 2020 and months of a raging coronavirus pandemic, will old acquaintances be forgot and never brought to mind? Covid-19, unchecked, has killed at least 330,000 Americans and almost 19 million of us have been infected with the disease. Those numbers likely are underestimated. Based on still tallying “excess deaths” in….
Continue ReadingFraudsters boost senior-care nightmares with ‘audacious’ hospice scams
With coronavirus infections and deaths rising anew in worrisome fashion from coast to coast, matters could not get worse with the nation’s long-term care, right? Guess again. Profit-mongering and “audacious, widespread fraud” apparently has run amok in hospice care in the Golden State. Because California, alas, too often serves as a trend-setting locale, patients, their….
Continue ReadingCovid-19 pandemic hits a grim U.S. milestone: 100,000+ nursing home deaths
While untold Americans tried to do right by older and more vulnerable friends and family members by taking extra precautions and even canceling Thanksgiving gatherings, the nation crossed a ghastly threshold for the aged, sick, and injured in late November: The coronavirus has killed at least 100,000 residents and staff in nursing homes and other….
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