Can Long-Term Care Employers Require Staff Members to Be Vaccinated?
As legal experts and ethicists debate, some companies aren’t waiting.
Joe Pendergast, a resident of Juniper Village, a nursing home in Bensalem, Pa., with Kevin Birtwell, a wellness nurse manager there. All staff members at Juniper are required to be vaccinated.Credit.Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York Times
Published March 5, 2021Updated March 8, 2021
For much of the winter, Meryl Gordon worried about the people caring for her 95-year-old mother, who was rehabbing in a Manhattan nursing home after surgery for a broken hip.
“Every week they sent out a note to families about how many staff members had positive Covid tests,” said Ms. Gordon, a biographer and professor at New York University. “It was a source of tremendous anxiety.”
The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed a national caregiving crisis that existed long before 2020. More than ever, the estimated 50 million Americans who serve as unpaid family caregivers are an essential extension of the health care team.
As Ms. Washington so clearly illustrated, their responsibilities are vast. Indeed, over the past decade there has been a dramatic shift in the United States to a model of out-of-hospital care that depends on the existence and competence of a caregiver and yet does very little to formally acknowledge, train or support such caregivers.
My colleagues and I are hopeful about the potential support of caregivers through President Bidenâs coronavirus emergency relief package, and through strategic plans he presented to create a 21st-century caregiving work force.
Biden must make good on his promise to support families with sick loved ones.
By Kate Washington
Ms. Washington is the author of a forthcoming book on caregiving. A dining critic at The Sacramento Bee, she has cared for her husband for six years through his treatment for lymphoma, a stem-cell transplant and chronic illness.
Feb. 22, 2021
Credit.Shestock/Getty Images
Five years ago I stood in a tiny hospital room wondering how I was going to care for the man I loved most without succumbing to despair.
For four months, my husband, Brad, had been recovering from a stem-cell transplant that saved his life from aggressive lymphoma. The hospital administration said he must go home, but he needed a level of support that, I thought, only a hospital could provide.
.
On a recent morning, Bill Williams, 87, awoke to learn of a terrible virus that had spread everywhere and was killing people. âWell, weâve got this virus,â an aide at his nursing home in Broken Bow, Neb., told him. A few minutes later, he had forgotten about the virus, and so the nursing aide told him again. And then again. She would have to tell him the next day, too.
âItâs pretty quiet in here,â Mr. Williams said, biting the inside of his lip a little.
âWell, weâve got this virus.â
On most days, after Mr. Williams forgets again about the virus, he gets out of his armchair and into his wheelchair and goes down the hallway at Brookestone View Skilled Nursing and Rehabilitation. Like other residents with Alzheimerâs disease or dementia, he is ânoncompliantâ with mask-wearing protocols. He says the masks fog up his glasses. Or he thinks: What mask? He is also ânoncompliantâ with social-distancing measures.
The Lockdown Showed How the Economy Exploits Women. She Already Knew.
Silvia FedericiCredit.Sharif Hamza for The New York Times
Sections
Silvia Federici has been warning for decades of what happens when we undervalue domestic labor.
Silvia FedericiCredit.Sharif Hamza for The New York Times
Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by Audm
To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times,
.
Prospect Park in May is a commotion of beauty: meadows and dense rambles, hills and hollows, everything covered in chokeberries, spicebush, violets, flowering hawthorns, magnolias and lindens. In this splendor the birds are boisterous, as are the people. But last May, the park was quieter than usual, and the people moving through it had a subdued, worried energy. Many wore masks; many did not. Occasionally someone shouted at someone else for coming too close. There was both fear of breathing common air and a desperate craving for it. Through this scene proceeded, at an energe