DALLAS CENTER, Iowa — “Covid doesn’t exactly happen in a nursing home,” said Deb Wityk, a 70-year-old retired massage therapist who lives at a center called Spurgeon Manor in rural Iowa. You have contracted the disease twice and are anticipated to receive the newly approved vaccine because you have chronic lymphocytic leukemia, which weakens your immune system.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention approved the newest vaccine on Sept. 12 and the new vaccines were available to the public over the past week. But many nursing homes may not start vaccinating until October or November. Infections among this vulnerable population rise dramatically, to about 1 percent, or 9. 7 per 1,000 residents, through mid-September, compared with a low of 2. 2 per 1,000 residents in mid-June.
“The distribution of the new COVID-19 vaccine is not going well,” said Chad Worz, CEO of the American Society of Consulting Pharmacists. “Older people living in such settings are, in fact, the most vulnerable and have been given priority. “
With the end of the formal public health emergency in May, the government stopped buying and distributing Covid vaccines. This has added headaches for nursing home operators who have encountered resistance during the pandemic to convince workers and citizens to get vaccinated.
The coronavirus decimated nursing homes in the first two years of the pandemic, killing more than 200,000 citizens and staff. Elizabeth Sobczyk, director of the Moving Needles Project, a CDC-funded initiative to increase adult vaccination rates in long-term care facilities, said that without government agreement to procure the vaccines, vaccine brands would only produce gigantic quantities once CDC experts recommended approval.
“Then they have to be inspected through the FDA (we need vaccines) and then there’s hiring and deployment,” Sobczyk said. “So I completely sense the frustration, but also why the availability wasn’t immediate. “
Even once vaccines are available, nursing homes face persistent vaccine resistance among nurses. Without the state’s legal responsibility to vaccinate workers, the maximum of nursing homes depends on persuasion, which proves difficult.
“People need covid-19 in the rearview mirror,” said Leslie Eber, medical director of Orchard Park Health Care Center in Centennial, Colorado. “We will have to remind ourselves more this year that covid-19 is not benign. Possibly it would be a love for other people, but possibly not a love for the people I love.
Sixty-two percent of nursing home citizens are up-to-date on their vaccinations, meaning they gained the timing to receive a booster before this month’s new vaccine. This is an improvement from 38% at the beginning of October 2022, according to the recent high. Federal knowledge since mid-September.
But 25% of nursing home workers are in good standing, which is close to last October’s rate.
In a written statement, the Department of Health and Human Services said it would identify long-term care facilities with low vaccination rates and ensure “proven infection prevention and control measures are in place to protect seniors. “Get vaccinated in pharmacies or gyms, your non-public time instead of at work. Many homes have clinics, and their long-term care pharmacies offer the vaccine as before, but they face more bureaucratic problems charging insurers for the vaccine for citizens and employees.
On top of that, families are rolling out a new vaccine against a dangerous respiratory virus, RSV, which will be a third shot for many residents, along with covid and flu vaccines.
The trio of vaccines will create more administrative complexity for nursing homes, as they will have to bill Medicare this year to receive reimbursement for the shots. The covid vaccine will have to be billed to Medicare Part B, which covers medical and outpatient services, but the RSV vaccine will need to be billed to Medicare Part D, the prescription drug benefit.
“America has been phenomenal at ruining vaccines,” said David Nace, medical director of UPMC Senior Communities in Pittsburgh. “This concept that some fall into Part B, some fall into Part D, and some can be billed through a pharmacy, that, at God’s call, did you come up with the concept for this?
While Medicare will pay for vaccines for most nursing home residents, workers will likely face problems in terms of personal insurance and, for a small group, possible fees.
Leslie Frane, executive vice president of the Service Employees International Union, which represents more than 134,000 employees in 1,465 nursing homes, said many nursing homes stopped operating clinics at their facilities and asked staff to stop by the pharmacy to get vaccinated. It would lead to more staff getting vaccinated.
“There is very little time, given the number of nursing home workers who are employed,” he said.
The CDC has arranged for 25 million to 30 million people without health insurance or whose insurance does not cover the full cost of the vaccine to receive free Covid shots at pharmacies, gyms and doctors’ offices indexed on vaccines. gov. Frane said the program is not well known among workers, and Worz said the distribution favors giant pharmacy chains, which slows down access in rural communities. Of the 19,400 independent pharmacies in the country, federal officials said 627, the most of which are in rural areas, are enrolled in the program and one hundred are growing.
However, a major obstacle remains vaccine resistance among nurses and stretcher-bearers. Like many facility owners, Avalon Health Care Group, which owns or operates more than a dozen nursing homes in Western states, does not require staff to be vaccinated. Sabine von Preyss-Friedman, Avalon’s chief medical officer, said she was looking forward to discussing motives with each employee and wouldn’t give up.
“We’re not going to just say, ‘Okay, everybody gets vaccinated,’ and then talk about it,” he said.
Avalon families have used modest monetary incentives, such as contests among other units, in which the winner receives prizes such as a pizza night or a giveaway at a branch, and those efforts will resume this year.
Jim Wright, medical director of Our Lady of Hope Health Center and two other nursing homes in Richmond, Virginia, said rewards and respectful persuasion weren’t enough to sway workers in their homes. They tend to be between 20 and 30 years old and do not worry about catching covid, which many of them have already overcome.
“They probably wouldn’t do it to protect citizens or to protect themselves,” he said. “I don’t know what the answer is. “
Sheena Bumpas, a registered nurse in Duncan, Oklahoma, and vice president of the National Association of Health Care Assistants, plans to get vaccinated this season, but said some of her colleagues won’t.
“Now that the public fitness emergency is over, I think other people are done with this,” he said.
Edenwald Senior Living, a nursing home in a retirement network in Towson, Maryland, requires its staff to be vaccinated unless they can justify an exemption on medical or religious grounds.
As of Sept. 10, about three-quarters of nursing home workers were up-to-date on their previous covid vaccinations, triple the national rate for nursing home workers, according to federal records.
Edenwald relies on the giant supermarket pharmacy to administer vaccines in the auditorium of his independent living department. The registration bureaucracy has already been distributed to clinics by the end of this month. The house collects insurance injections from workers, but facility managers said it would pay employers without fitness coverage.
“This is our seventh clinic for covid,” said Meghan Curtis, Edenwald’s director of care management. “We kind of figured it out. “
Swati Gaur, medical director of three fitness formula-affiliated nursing homes in northeast Georgia, said it’s possible leaders are simply offering recalcitrant workers the option of taking the Novavax vaccine. It is based on a more classic generation of virus blocking than Moderna or Pfizer injections that use messenger RNA.
“Basically, we say, ‘Why don’t you get vaccinated?It’s made like the flu vaccine,” Gaur said.
For the first time, nursing home residents will be introduced to a respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, vaccine. The virus causes the hospitalization of up to 160,000 elderly people aged 65 and older, killing up to 10,000 people. Most nursing homes pair the flu shot with the covid vaccine or the RSV vaccine, but don’t try to administer all three simultaneously.
Gaur said that because of the novelty of the vaccine and the relative lack of knowledge about RSV, doctors will want to spend more time explaining the reason for the shots.
In Dallas Center, Iowa, Spurgeon Manor, an independent nonprofit home, is partnering with the pharmacy of a nearby Hy-Vee grocery store to supply the covid vaccine, likely in early October, to 85 citizens of the nursing home and an adjacent Remedy Room. Life center and employees.
Alana Marean, Spurgeon’s deputy director of nursing, said they would be encouraged to get the shots, but assumed not even a portion would. “There’s a lot of stigma about it,” he said.
Resident Lee Giese, 95, a retired truck driver, said he is looking for the definitive photo after contracting covid last winter. You suspect that your previous vaccinations have helped protect you from more severe symptoms.
He expects most citizens at his facility to get vaccinated, but some will refuse. “Some people prefer to die,” he said.
This article was produced through KFF Health News, formerly known as Kaiser Health News (KHN), a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism on fitness issues and is one of KFF’s primary operating systems: the independent source for fitness policies, surveys and journalistic investigations. .
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DALLAS CENTER, Iowa — “Covid doesn’t exactly happen in a nursing home,” said Deb Wityk, a 70-year-old retired massage therapist who lives at a center called Spurgeon Manor in rural Iowa. You have contracted the disease twice and are anticipated to receive the newly approved vaccine because you have chronic lymphocytic leukemia, which weakens your immune system.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention approved the newest vaccine on Sept. 12 and the new vaccines were available to the public over the past week. But many nursing homes may not start vaccinating until October or November. Infections among this vulnerable population rise dramatically, to about 1 percent, or 9. 7 per 1,000 residents, through mid-September, compared with a low of 2. 2 per 1,000 residents in mid-June.
“The distribution of the new COVID-19 vaccine is not going well,” said Chad Worz, CEO of the American Society of Consulting Pharmacists. “Older people living in such settings are, in fact, the most vulnerable and have been given priority. “
With the end of the formal public health emergency in May, the government stopped buying and distributing Covid vaccines. This has added headaches for nursing home operators who have encountered resistance during the pandemic to convince workers and citizens to get vaccinated.
The coronavirus decimated nursing homes in the first two years of the pandemic, killing more than 200,000 citizens and staff. Elizabeth Sobczyk, director of the Moving Needles Project, a CDC-funded initiative to increase adult vaccination rates in long-term care facilities, said that without government agreement to procure the vaccines, vaccine brands would only produce gigantic quantities once CDC experts recommended approval.
“Then they have to be inspected through the FDA (we need vaccines) and then there’s hiring and deployment,” Sobczyk said. “So I completely sense the frustration, but also why the availability wasn’t immediate. “
Even once vaccines are available, nursing homes face persistent vaccine resistance among nurses. Without the state’s legal responsibility to vaccinate workers, the maximum of nursing homes depends on persuasion, which proves difficult.
“People need covid-19 in the rearview mirror,” said Leslie Eber, medical director of Orchard Park Health Care Center in Centennial, Colorado. “We will have to remind ourselves more this year that covid-19 is not benign. Possibly it would be a love for other people, but possibly not a love for the people I love.
Sixty-two percent of nursing home citizens are up-to-date on their vaccinations, meaning they gained the timing to receive a booster before this month’s new vaccine. This is an improvement from 38% at the beginning of October 2022, according to the recent high. Federal knowledge since mid-September.
But 25% of nursing home workers are in good standing, which is close to last October’s rate.
In a written statement, the Department of Health and Human Services said it would identify long-term care facilities with low vaccination rates and ensure “proven infection prevention and control measures are in place to protect seniors. “Get vaccinated in pharmacies or gyms, your non-public time instead of at work. Many homes have clinics, and their long-term care pharmacies offer the vaccine as before, but they face more bureaucratic problems charging insurers for the vaccine for citizens and employees.
On top of that, families are rolling out a new vaccine against a dangerous respiratory virus, RSV, which will be a third shot for many residents, along with covid and flu vaccines.
The trio of vaccines will create more administrative complexity for nursing homes, as they will have to bill Medicare this year to receive reimbursement for the shots. The covid vaccine will have to be billed to Medicare Part B, which covers medical and outpatient services, but the RSV vaccine will need to be billed to Medicare Part D, the prescription drug benefit.
“America has been phenomenal at ruining vaccines,” said David Nace, medical director of UPMC Senior Communities in Pittsburgh. “This concept that some fall into Part B, some fall into Part D, and some can be billed through a pharmacy, that, at God’s call, did you come up with the concept for this?
While Medicare will pay for vaccines for most nursing home residents, workers will likely face problems in terms of personal insurance and, for a small group, possible fees.
Leslie Frane, executive vice president of the Service Employees International Union, which represents more than 134,000 employees in 1,465 nursing homes, said many nursing homes stopped operating clinics at their facilities and asked staff to stop by the pharmacy to get vaccinated. It would lead to more staff getting vaccinated.
“There is very little time, given the number of nursing home workers who are employed,” he said.
The CDC has ensured that 25 to 30 million people who are uninsured or whose insurance does not cover the full load of the vaccine receive free Covid shots at pharmacies, gyms, and doctors’ offices indexed in vacunas. gov. Frane said the program is not well known among workers, and Worz said distribution favors giant pharmacy chains, slowing access in rural communities. Of the 19,400 independent pharmacies in the country, federal officials said 627, the most of which are in rural areas, are enrolled in the program. and a hundred are being added.
However, a major obstacle remains vaccine resistance among nurses and stretcher-bearers. Like many facility owners, Avalon Health Care Group, which owns or operates more than a dozen nursing homes in Western states, does not require staff to be vaccinated. Sabine von Preyss-Friedman, Avalon’s chief medical officer, said she was looking forward to discussing motives with each employee and wouldn’t give up.
“We’re not going to just say, ‘Okay, everybody gets vaccinated,’ and then talk about it,” he said.
Avalon families have used modest monetary incentives, such as contests among other units, in which the winner receives prizes such as a pizza night or a giveaway at a branch, and those efforts will resume this year.
Jim Wright, medical director of Our Lady of Hope Health Center and two other nursing homes in Richmond, Virginia, said rewards and respectful persuasion weren’t enough to sway workers in their homes. They tend to be between 20 and 30 years old and do not worry about catching covid, which many of them have already overcome.
“They probably wouldn’t do it to protect citizens or to protect themselves,” he said. “I don’t know what the answer is. “
Sheena Bumpas, a registered nurse in Duncan, Oklahoma, and vice president of the National Association of Health Care Assistants, plans to get vaccinated this season, but said some of her colleagues won’t.
“Now that the public fitness emergency is over, I think other people are done with this,” he said.
Edenwald Senior Living, a nursing home in a retirement network in Towson, Maryland, requires its staff to be vaccinated unless they can justify an exemption on medical or religious grounds.
As of Sept. 10, about three-quarters of nursing home workers were up-to-date on their previous covid vaccinations, triple the national rate for nursing home workers, according to federal records.
Edenwald relies on the giant supermarket pharmacy to administer vaccines in the auditorium of his independent living department. The registration bureaucracy has already been distributed to clinics by the end of this month. The house collects insurance injections from workers, but facility managers said it would pay employers without fitness coverage.
“This is our seventh clinic for covid,” said Meghan Curtis, Edenwald’s director of care management. “We kind of figured it out. “
Swati Gaur, medical director of three fitness formula-affiliated nursing homes in northeast Georgia, said it’s possible leaders are simply offering recalcitrant workers the option of taking the Novavax vaccine. It is based on a more classic generation of virus blocking than Moderna or Pfizer injections that use messenger RNA.
“Basically, we say, ‘Why don’t you get vaccinated?It’s made like the flu vaccine,” Gaur said.
For the first time, nursing home residents will be introduced to a respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, vaccine. The virus causes the hospitalization of up to 160,000 elderly people aged 65 and older, killing up to 10,000 people. Most nursing homes pair the flu shot with the covid vaccine or the RSV vaccine, but don’t try to administer all three simultaneously.
Gaur said that because of the novelty of the vaccine and the relative lack of knowledge about RSV, doctors will want to spend more time explaining the reason for the shots.
In Dallas Center, Iowa, Spurgeon Manor, an independent nonprofit home, is partnering with the pharmacy of a nearby Hy-Vee grocery store to supply the covid vaccine, likely in early October, to 85 citizens of the nursing home and an adjacent Remedy Room. Life center and employees.
Alana Marean, Spurgeon’s deputy director of nursing, said they would be encouraged to get the shots, but assumed not even a portion would. “There’s a lot of stigma about it,” he said.
Resident Lee Giese, 95, a retired truck driver, said he is looking for the definitive photo after contracting covid last winter. You suspect that your previous vaccinations have helped protect you from more severe symptoms.
He expects most citizens at his facility to get vaccinated, but some will refuse. “Some people prefer to die,” he said.
This article was produced through KFF Health News, formerly known as Kaiser Health News (KHN), a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism on fitness issues and is one of KFF’s primary operating systems: the independent source for fitness policies, surveys and journalistic investigations. .
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism on fitness issues and is one of the primary operating systems for KFF, an independent fitness policy research, survey and journalism agency. Learn more about KFF.
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