Sharing Lessons from Successes: Facilities that Weathered the Storm of COVID-19 and Staffing Crises

As we are finding our way out of the COVID-19 pandemic and Public Health Emergency (PHE) that devastated so many lives – particularly in nursing homes – there is an opportunity to look back at what happened, both the good and the bad, and find the lessons we can learn from to perhaps do better in the future. This is particularly true in evaluating what was happening in long-term care facilities prior to and during the pandemic that affected their response to COVID-19, and the subsequent increase in staffing shortages that many facilities are experiencing. In this episode, Consumer Voice Executive Director, Lori Smetanka, talks with David Farrell, a licensed nursing home administrator who has spent his entire career in the long-term care profession, about the long-term care facilities that had better outcomes than their peers, or as David notes, facilities that “weathered the storm of COVID-19 and staffing crises.” David and his colleagues did a deep dive into those facilities that were outliers or stood out from their peers with regard to COVID-19 infections and staffing shortages, to try to determine what was happening that we could learn from, and hopefully replicate.