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What is the state of nursing home and assisted living facilities within Pennsylvania and what are some ways to make them better?

  • Aniya Faulcon
Pennsylvania has one of the oldest populations in the United States and is home to about 126,000 people in nursing homes and assisted living facilities.

 Matthias Zomer / Pexels

Pennsylvania has one of the oldest populations in the United States and is home to about 126,000 people in nursing homes and assisted living facilities.

Airdate: December 12, 2022

According to The National Center for Health Statistics, residents of assisted living and nursing home facilities are older, sicker and more compromised by impairments than in the past.

In addition to the challenges residents face, facilities are faced with challenges that make it difficult to provide the care that residents need and pay for at a costly rate.

To provide some insight on the state of assistant living and nursing home facilities within Pennsylvania and ways to make them better, Zach Shamberg, president and CEO of the Pennsylvania Health Care Association, Margie Zelenak, executive director of the Pennsylvania Assisted Living Association and Anne Adams, 95-year-old assisted living resident in Lancaster, illustrator and author of the art book, The People I see, joined us on Monday’s The Spark.

Shamberg said, residents in nursing homes and assisted living are between fifty and one hundred years old. He said, the fundamental difference between nursing homes, personal care and assisted living is the level of care. Nursing homes provide around the clock care for the sickest elderly individuals in Pennsylvania and assisted living facilities and personal care provide a lower level of care for those individuals.

Some of the challenges that nursing home facilities are facing are a lack of Medicaid funding, inflation costs that affect the cost of living for residents, low wages for staff and more.

“You know, when our staff can go to Sheetz and make $17 an hour, why would they come and work in personal care and assisted living?,” Zelenak said. “And then because it is private pay, the only way for us to pay higher wages is to charge more to residents, which spends them down quicker.”

Assisted living facilities are also challenged tremendously by the workforce and access to care crisis.

“We have senior citizens who are quite literally being turned away by long-term care providers because they don’t have enough staff to care for them,” Shamberg said. “We’ve got nursing homes that have closed entire floors or wings of their buildings and we’re also seeing that there’s an impact on our hospitals that are being filled to capacity because they can’t discharge residents to long term care facilities. So we’ve got a real problem in one of the oldest states in terms of our population in the entire country.”

Some of the ways to combat these challenges at facilities:

  • More Medicaid funding for nursing homes
  • Raising staffing minimums; new nursing home staffing minimums will go into effect July 2023
  • New training methods for staff; during the pandemic facilities have incorporated a blended training method that takes place online and in-person
  • Nursing home facilities created a new temporary nurse aide position to bring more professionals to the front lines and train them to be certified nursing assistants
  • Changing the negative narrative surrounding long-term care to bring workers back to the industry
  • Using a quality reimbursement system to reimburse providers for the care that they provide
  • Using the population health management method to work with a care team and an individual throughout the long-term care continuum to ensure that they’re healthy and to control costs.

Adams uses the art in her book, that she created with crayons from her facility, to capture the beauty within her assisted living environment and escape the challenges she faces as a resident. She encourages other residents of long-term care facilities to do the same.

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