Pictured is Tom Holt, president and CEO of Lutheran Jamestown. Lutheran offers an array of services including the assisted living facility and nursing home, and between these two services, only 25 residents have contracted COVID. Submitted photo

Due to the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, nursing homes have had to adjust in order to maintain safe and healthy operations.

At Heritage Ministries locations throughout the county, cases of COVID-19 are trickling down to a rate substantially lower than the beginning of the year.

“In Chautauqua County, we’ve been fortunate in the last several months not to have any major outbreaks,” said Jeremy Rutter, Heritage chief clinical officer. “We are having some cases, on average one to two cases a month. Certainly nothing that’s disruptive to the service of our residents.”

Rutter said the slow infection rate is a big step forward from the “severe and significant” rates witnessed at the beginning of the year and last year.

“Since the rollout of the vaccine, we’ve seen great success,” Rutter said. “In general, about 50% of our staff are vaccinated, and 90% of our residents are vaccinated, which is great. We even have some sites that are at 100%. The residents and their families have really come on board with (vaccinations). ”

Heritage Ministries P-J file photo

All staff are continue to be tested weekly at Heritage sites, which aligns with the state guidelines for nursing homes and assisted living centers.

Although many nursing homes throughout the country are facing staff shortages, Heritage Ministries is not one of them, and staff are incentivized to cover whatever shortages may occur.

“We certainly have opportunities to bring on new staff,” Rutter said, “but we have a great incentive program amongst our staff, so whatever shortages we may have are offset with our current staff.”

Rutter said getting staff hired at nursing homes has always been a difficult undertaking due to the nature of the work, and that is only exacerbated by a pandemic.

Given the current climate of the pandemic, Heritage has seen a small decline in admission rates, but the facilities are still above the national average.

“We’ve seen about a 10% decline … but we haven’t seen anything that’s been real detrimental to our ability to provide great service,” Rutter said. “We’re still above the national average. You get that when you provide an excellent service. We’re four- and five-star facilities, but the national average has declined and we’ve declined in proportion to that.”

Rutter said because of the pandemic, there are two main concerns for admitting residents. Insurance companies are less likely to approve short-stay rehabilitation in nursing homes and people are afraid despite the care Heritage provides and the precautions taken to mitigate infection rates.

“If they’ve never experienced the great care we provide and all they hear is horror stories, then people don’t want to come in to the nursing home,” Rutter said.

Just like many businesses and services have had to re-think their approach, nursing homes have had to become innovative in the face of a global pandemic.

“What it’s forced us to do is look outside the norm of what we’ve typically done in the past ” Rutter said. “It’s brought up this opportunity of utilizing technology more to connect our residents to families and providers. It has spurred a lot of innovation.”

Kiosks that read visitor and staff temperatures, administer the required COVID screening and store that information are just one example of how services like Heritage Ministries utilize technology to meet the demands of the pandemic.

Although people may be concerned about placing family members in nursing homes during the pandemic, Rutter said Heritage Ministries locations are safe places that provide care.

“We’re so heavily regulated — which is a great thing,” Rutter said. “We have a fantastic infection control program, and it’s led by a nationwide group that are experts in the field of healthcare. We have a CDC infection preventionist that leads our COVID team.”

Heritage also provides a cleaning and disinfection program to ensure the safety of staff and residents.

Lutheran Jamestown offers assisted living facilities and nursing homes, and throughout the pandemic, Lutheran has remained safe for residents and staff.

“Honestly, I would say we’ve never really had a (COVID) outbreak,” said Lutheran president and CEO Tom Holt. “Outbreak is kind of a deceptive word in the world that we’ve lived in this last year because the Health Department would say one case signifies an outbreak.”

“Frankly, we’ve had very few cases,” Holt added. “Campus-wide, among residents we’ve had 25 cases and 56 among staff, all really spread out. We didn’t have our first case until September 2020. I don’t think we’ve ever had more than three or four active cases at any point in time.”

Lutheran is also on top of having staff and residents vaccinated at rates comparable to the statewide average.

“The nursing home (staff) is about 65% to 67%, which is mirroring the statewide average,” Holt said. “Assisted living has been better. We’ve been in the mid- to-upper 80s. Of residents, I would say we’re above 95% of residents. The only residents that didn’t take the vaccine we’re folks that had a clinical reason.”

Like the nursing home industry as a whole, Lutheran is facing some staffing shortages. Holt points to the unfair portrayal of nursing homes throughout the pandemic as one of the reasons.

“I think any one of us (nursing homes) would take more staff today if they were available to us,” Holt said. “Nursing homes we’re pretty unfairly portrayed, in my view, as the only part of the health care sector that wasn’t doing the right thing.”

“Our hope is that people realize that folks were safe here throughout the pandemic, as safe as they were going to be really anywhere,” he added. “The nursing home had no deaths attributed to the virus.”

Lutheran, like Heritage, has seen some decline in admission rates throughout the pandemic.

“There’s been a huge change in admission patterns related to COVID, in large part because on the nursing home side we were doing a lot of post-operative rehab,” Holt said. “For the first several months of the pandemic, all elective surgeries were held.”

Holt said industry-wide occupancy numbers have declined 15% to 20% throughout the pandemic, and Lutheran has been in line with those numbers.

“Our traditional non-post-op admissions stayed pretty much the same,” Holt said. “Assisted living was challenged differently because we weren’t able to do tours.”

Assisted living admissions is a “much more hands-on” process due to the nature of the field. Potential assisted living customers need tours of the facility, and because of the pandemic it was largely impossible to administer those much-needed tours. Holt said Lutheran has recently re-initiated tours for assisted living.

“Candidly, I don’t think that the nursing home field will ever be the same post-COVID because those post-op patients were still getting surgeries, but the acute care system learned how to send those people home,” Holt said.

Holt said because of this trend of being sent home post-operation, he anticipates a shrinking of nursing home capacity statewide.

Despite the narrative of nursing homes being unsafe throughout the pandemic, Holt said he’s received numerous phone calls commending Lutheran’s ability to keep loved ones safe.

“I think a lot of people who got past their anger came to appreciate that services like ours and others have been available,” Holt said.

Holt said because of the pandemic, “being an educated consumer is now more important than it’s ever been” when it comes to placing a family member in a nursing home.

“To understand how a facility came through the coronavirus is an indication of what the facility had been doing leading into the (pandemic),” he said. “You didn’t suddenly get good at infection control, you were always good at infection control. You didn’t suddenly get sloppy at infection control, you probably were sloppy before.”

Holt is grateful for the level of awareness that Lutheran families have displayed throughout the pandemic.

“I would like to say a word of thanks to our families that have really been understanding,” Holt said. “The community generally has done well. Thanks for everyone’s patience in helping us through this tough time.”