The state of the residential long-term care industry
The COVID-19 pandemic has shined a bright light on the challenges facing workers in the residential long-term care (LTC) industry: inadequate staffing, training, personal protective equipment (PPE), pay, and job quality that results in high rates of turnover. Combined with an unchecked profit-seeking business model in many long-term care facilities, this has led to horrific outcomes for residents and staff during the pandemic. As of May 1, 2022, more than 200,000 long-term care facility residents and workers have died from COVID-19 (Chidambaram 2022).
Conditions were even more dire for Black and Latinx communities. Early in the pandemic, the New York Times reported that nursing homes with higher shares of Black and Latinx residents were more likely to have experienced COVID-19 cases (Gebeloff et al. 2020). These disparities persisted even when accounting for factors such as population density and nursing home size. The underlying issues of poor job quality for workers and poor living conditions for residents existed in this industry prior to the pandemic. Nonetheless, the current heightened awareness of the dire conditions in long-term services and support facilities presents an opportunity to spotlight and improve working and living conditions for residential long-term care workers and residents and connect them to front-of-mind public health concerns.
The residential long-term care industry is composed of a wide range of establishments serving different populations with different needs. This includes nursing homes, residential facilities for people with intellectual or development disabilities, facilities for people with mental health or substance abuse illnesses, assisted living facilities for the elderly, and continuing care facilities for the elderly. At the same time, residential long-term care is just one component of our much larger care infrastructure, which often relies on labor that is chronically undervalued and often entirely unpaid.
People receive long-term services and support (LTSS) or other care services for a variety of reasons. As people age or experience chronic illness and disability, many need a range of services such as assistance with bathing, dressing, toilet care, shopping, preparing meals, housekeeping, and managing medications. Or people need shorter-term services in the immediate aftermath of an illness, injury, or medical procedure.
https://www.epi.org/publication/residential-long-term-care-workers/