Kelly Womochil, an aide at Business Estates Nursing Center in Business, Kan., tries out a poncho that the Federal Emergency Situation Management Agency is sending to nursing homes to protect versus the coronavirus.
Pamela Black.
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Pamela Black.
Kelly Womochil, an aide at Enterprise Estates Nursing Center in Business, Kan., tries on a poncho that the Federal Emergency Management Company is sending to nursing houses to protect versus the coronavirus.
Pamela Black.
Across the United States, nursing homes trying to secure their locals from the coronavirus excitedly wait for boxes of masks, eyewear and dress promised by the federal government.
Some contain lightweight surgical masks or fabric face coverings that are explicitly not planned for medical use.
Cloth masks and ponchos
Regardless of President Trump’s pledge on April 30 to “deploy every resource and power that we have” to protect older Americans, a fifth of the country’s nursing homes– 3,213 out of more than 15,000– reported throughout the last two weeks of Might that they had less than a week’s supply of masks, gowns, gloves, eye protectors or hand sanitizer, according to federal records.
” The federal government’s failure to nationalize the supply chain and take control of it contributed to the deaths in nursing homes,” said Scott LaRue, president and CEO of ArchCare, the health care system of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, which runs 5 nursing homes.
Some homes still have not received the very first of 2 batches of products the Federal Emergency situation Management Company stated it would deliver in May.
As houses keep scrounging for materials in a disorderly market with jacked-up costs and continued scarcity, 653 skilled nursing centers informed the government they had actually totally run out of one or more types of protective materials at some point in the last two weeks of May, according to records released last week by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, or CMS.
” The federal government has got to step up,” said Lori Smetanka, executive director of the National Customer Voice for Quality Long-Term Care, an advocacy group based in Washington, D.C. “We’re now– what?