While some nurses feel pulled into treating children, others love to care for those in their later years by working in the geriatric field.
If you’ve ever wondered what these nurses do, why they like it, or if it’s the facet of the field that fits you, we’ve got you covered.
We interviewed Nancy Mitchell, RN. She has more than 37 years of experience in geriatric nursing care, both as a senior care nurse and director of nursing care, and she took the time to answer our questions.
What follows is our interview, edited for length and clarity.
Nancy Mitchell, RN, has more than 37 years of experience in geriatric nursing care, both as a senior care nurse and director of nursing care.
How did you get interested in being a geriatric nurse? What drew you to it? How long have you been doing it?
I’ve worked in senior care for more than three decades. Geriatric care is unique in that it is less hectic than working in the emergency department or on surgical wards but can be equally demanding.
What drew me most to this discipline is the patient care aspect. It’s not strictly medical. Eldercare allows me to give back to communities in more than one way. The senior population plays a significant role in enriching any social group. Ensuring their health is my way of contributing to the holistic wellness of our communities.
What does a geriatric nurse do? What types of patients do you serve? What do you provide for them?
One of the primary roles of a geriatric nurse is to help elderly patients–those 65 and older–continue to live independently. We manage and treat underlying conditions to avoid having them progress into debilitating stages. We also educate patients and their families on ways to help support their health at an older age.
However, as a geriatric nurse, managing debilitating diseases also comes with the job. We deal with cases of Alzheimer’s disease, Multiple Sclerosis, and other neurodegenerative conditions regularly. Some of us are based in hospice care, specializing in making the transition process as pleasant as possible for terminally ill patients.
Generally, we specialize in helping older patients cope with the stark physical and emotional changes to their bodies as they navigate aging.
It is our responsibility to care for and protect the older population.
Did you need to get additional education for this position?
There’s no obligation to pursue additional education beyond your BSN to become a geriatric nurse. It depends on your plans for career advancement. Some nurses become geriatric nurse practitioners, specializing in diagnosing ailments and prescribing treatment for elderly patients.
What do you like most about working as a geriatric nurse?
Unlike ER work, geriatric nursing is a socially enriching profession, where you treat patients tonight and send them off within hours. Most elderly care facilities serve as extended living centers for patients temporarily or permanently. This allows you to forge meaningful, professional relationships with patients.
Seniors have lived some of the most exciting lives, and they love sharing fascinating stories and life lessons that anyone can benefit from hearing.
What are your biggest challenges as a geriatric nurse?
Geriatric wards see some of the highest mortalities. Most patients struggle with three or more underlying conditions. The profession requires a high level of emotional intelligence and fortitude.
What are your greatest rewards as one?
My greatest reward is touching patients’ lives, even in the later stages of their lives. Some of these patients live alone and are lonely, so they depend on the social interactions of nurses as encouragement throughout their treatment. I’m honored to provide a helping shoulder to them.
Is there else that is important for our readers to know?
People tend to assume that the body follows a steady trend in how it works throughout your lifetime. But, in reality, the geriatric body significantly differs from someone in their mid-30s or teens. So geriatric care is a discipline on its own.
Amid a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” more than 40% of the nation’s nursing home and long-term health care workers have yet to receive vaccinations.
They are two sisters in two states. Both are dedicated health care professionals who watched in horror as COVID-19 swept through the nation’s nursing homes, killing a staggering number of residents and staff alike.
One sister is now vaccinated. The other is not.
“Dude. Get vaccinated!” Heidi Lucas texted her sister Ashley in May from her home in Jefferson City, Missouri.
“Nope lol,” Ashley Lucas texted back from Orbisonia, Pennsylvania.
“Don’t you work with old people?”
“Yeah”
“What if you killed one of them? Get vaccinated,” Heidi wrote.
Neither sister is budging as the Delta variant brings a new spike in coronavirus numbers across the nation.
Their divide mirrors America’s larger one, where the vaccine to combat COVID-19 is eagerly embraced by some, yet eyed with suspicion and rejected by others.
It is the refusal group, including a significant percentage who work in the nation’s nursing homes, that has confounded and alarmed health care officials who are at a loss as to how to sway them.
Nursing homes faced a shocking mortality rate during the pandemic. In the U.S., COVID-19 killed more than 133,000 residents and nearly 2,000 staff members between May 31, 2020 and this July 4, according to Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services reports. The true toll is thought to be even higher as data gathering lagged in the early months of the crisis, health experts say.
Working in a nursing home became one of the “most dangerous jobs” in America in 2020, according to an analysis of work-related deaths by Scientific American.
Yet seven months after the first vaccines became available to medical professionals, only 59% of staff at the nation’s nursing homes and other long-term care facilities are fully or partially vaccinated — with eight states reporting an average rate of less than half, according to CMS data updated last week.
Twenty-three individual facilities had vaccination rates of under 1%, the data showed.
Staff vaccinations have lagged even as the overall rate for residents climbed to 83%, according to the CMS data.
The strong vaccination percentage among nursing home residents is credited, in part, to an early campaign to bring the vaccine directly to facilities. That suggests availability is not necessarily the issue behind staff going without.
So, what is?
The question defies easy answers. Vaccine refusal is regional and often aligns not only with individuals’ political alignment but also with their preferred news sources and which social media they follow.
Last week, President Joe Biden took aim at Facebook and other social media giants for failing to police vaccine misinformation that amplifies conspiracy theories and discourages people from getting vaccinated. “They’re killing people,” he said, directly blaming the platforms. On Monday, he recast the accusation to say it was specific individuals posting dangerous information who are culpable.
On Tuesday, U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., pleaded to “anyone out there willing to listen: Get vaccinated.” While not mentioning skeptics specifically — including those in his own party — the Republican leader urged the unvaccinated to ignore “demonstrably bad advice.”COVID-19 cases are now surging in every state, with new hospitalizations and deaths almost entirely occurring among the unvaccinated. “This is becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky warned last week during a White House briefing.
In May, CMS began requiring weekly reports on vaccinations of residents and staff at nursing homes and other long-term care facilities. The emerging data confirms many health care experts’ worst fears, especially for Southern states.
Louisiana has the lowest statewide average: Just 44.5% of the staff at its long-term care facilities have been at least partially vaccinated, according to CMS data released last week.
Florida, the second lowest-vaccinated state, had a rate of just under 46% among its nursing home and long-term care staff, with Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Georgia, Mississippi and Wyoming all showing rates of less than 50 percent, according to the data.
Vaccination rates in assisted living facilities are not included in the data.
A separate American Association of Retired Persons analysis, released last week, showed that only one in five of the nation’s more than 15,000 nursing homes were able to hit a goal, set by two industry trade groups, of vaccinating 75% of their staff by the end of June.
While cases in nursing homes have recently slowed, and most of the new COVID-19 infections are among younger people, some experts still worry of a return to darker days.
The CDC recently launched an investigation into deaths of residents at several western Colorado senior facilities possibly linked to unvaccinated staff, the Associated Press reported Wednesday.
“We need to sound the alarm,” said Susan Reinhard, senior vice president of AARP and director of its Public Policy Institute. “Nursing homes were devastated by COVID-19, and many residents remain highly vulnerable to the virus.”
Nationally, more than 89% of people 65 or older have received at least partial vaccination, the CDC reported this week. Still, public health experts have warned that even if fully vaccinated, the elderly may be vulnerable to “breakthrough” coronavirus infection because of compromised immune systems and other underlying health problems.
In Missouri’s southern region, the overall rate of full vaccination in some rural counties is less than 20%, according to state health department and CDC tracking. The latest surge of the delta variant has turned the area into a “tinderbox,” Steven Edwards, CEO of the CoxHealth hospital system in Springfield, recently told reporters.
On Thursday, 160 patients were being treated for COVID-19 at CoxHealth, a spokesperson told ProPublica. On May 14, there were 18.
Heidi Lucas directs the Missouri Nurses Association. She is pro-vaccine and has been pushing hard for nurses to get vaccinated, especially those on the front lines of patient care. Lucas said it is impossible to separate the lack of vaccination among staff from the lack of vaccinations in individual communities. “Nurses are people too,” she said. “They are on social media and are inundated with false information. How do you fight it?”
Her sister, Ashley Lucas, lives 900 miles away in Orbisonia, a small town of around 500 people about an hour south of State College. She’s a traveling certified nursing assistant at area nursing homes and chose to skip the vaccine.
Her fiance and her children, ages 12 and 13, are also unvaccinated. “I don’t consider myself an anti-vaxxer,” she told ProPublica, bristling that some might see her as reckless or ill-informed.
Instead, she said her decision was carefully considered. It never made sense to her, she said, that the virus seemed to strike randomly, with some residents getting sick while others did not. She said she is not convinced the vaccine would change the odds.
She’s also concerned after hearing that the vaccine could interfere with fertility — a contention that has been deemed false by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization. It all leads her to believe more research is needed into the vaccines’ long-term effects.
“This is just a personal choice and I feel it should be a free choice,” she said. “I think it’s been forced on us way too much.”
Certified nursing assistants make up the largest group of employees working in nursing homes and other long-term care facilities, providing roughly 90 percent of direct patient care. They are typically overworked and underpaid, most earning about $13 per hour and receiving no paid sick leave or other benefits, said Lori Porter, co-founder and CEO of the National Association of Health Care Assistants.
Porter said she is not completely surprised by the low vaccination rate. It comes down to trust, she said, both of the vaccines and of facility administrators who now say staff must get vaccinated. Refusal may feel like empowerment. “It’s the first time ever they have had the ball in their court,” Porter said.
On March 31, Houston Methodist Hospital mandated that all of its 26,000 employees be vaccinated by June 7 or lose their jobs. Jennifer Bridges, a nurse, sued along with 116 other employees, claiming the health care system had overstepped its rights and that she and the others refused to be “human guinea pigs,” evoking the Nuremberg Code, a set of ethical standards established in response to Nazi medical experimentation in concentration camps.
On June 12, U.S. District Judge Lynn N. Hughes dismissed the closely watched case, taking offense to likening the vaccine to the Holocaust, which he called “reprehensible.” Ten days later, 153 Houston Methodist employees either were fired or quit after refusing the vaccine. The judge’s ruling has been appealed.
A handful of long-term care chains have similarly sought to mandate worker vaccines, but such action is far from widespread in the industry. One sticking point has been whether vaccination can legally be required, since all three available vaccines have only emergency use authorization, not full approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.The thornier issue, though, is whether the facilities can risk losing staff when they’re already short-handed. Many workers have vowed to quit rather than be forced into vaccinations.
Aegis Living, a long-term senior care provider in three Western states, made vaccines mandatory for its roughly 2,600 employees on July 1. Dwayne Clark, founder and CEO, said initially 400 employees refused but when the deadline arrived, only about 100 left rather than be vaccinated.
“We lost some staff that we didn’t want to lose,” Clark told ProPublica, “but it felt like the right moral protocol to impose.”
Recently the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued guidelines stating that employers can require workers to be vaccinated as long as medical or religious exemptions are permitted.
“Nursing home workers certainly have the right to make decisions about their own health and welfare, but they don’t have the right to place vulnerable residents at risk,” said Lawrence Gostin, a health law professor at Georgetown University. “Nursing homes don’t just have the power to require vaccinations, they have the duty.”
Still, the issue is far from resolved.
“America is a highly litigious country,” Gostin said, “I expect the courts to consistently uphold nursing home mandates, because they are entirely lawful and justified. But there will likely be lawsuits at least until it is quite clear they are futile.”
Diane Peters is a registered nurse in the Chicago suburbs who last year worked at a nursing home and is now working at a senior rehabilitation center. She does not trust the science behind the vaccine and is unvaccinated. So is her fiance.
Everything about the rollout felt like propaganda, she said. Development was too rushed. Clinical trials typically take years, she said, not months. “I don’t think it’s safe right now, it needs more time,” she said she tells patients if they ask.
Most don’t, she said. Neither do her co-workers. She has only been asked once by her employer if she was vaccinated, she said, declining to name the company.
Peters guesses about 40 percent of her colleagues are also unvaccinated, but said no one likes to talk about it because the divide surrounding the vaccine is “surreal.” Staff members are tested regularly and are required to wear masks, she said.
She is doubtful mandates would stick. “They can threaten,” she said, “but a lot of nurses would walk.”
She trusts her instincts and her own research for now. When asked what would change her mind, she had one word: “Nothing.”
Jasmine De Moya, 17, has dreamed for years of working in the medical field, and she yearned to spend time with older people, missing her grandparents, who live in the Dominican Republic. A program sponsored by the New Jewish Home health system in New York City that combines volunteering and free training for entry-level health jobs, career coaching and assistance on her college prep is helping make her hopes come alive.
Over the past three years, Jasmine has learned a lot about caring for older people, from the importance of speaking slowly and being gentle with frail residents who may have hearing or comprehension problems to how to brush their teeth or bathe them.
“We practiced first with mannequins, so when we actually [worked on residents] I was in shock,” she said. “Cleaning a body and their private areas, I never expected I would do that. But then I got used to it.”
Last summer, Jasmine completed a certified nursing assistant training course. She has also researched and applied for colleges and student loans with help from an organization that the geriatrics career development program provides to volunteers like her. After graduating from high school last month, Jasmine will start nursing school at Lehman College in the Bronx in the fall. She’ll be the first in her family to attend college.
Since it launched in 2006, the geriatrics career development program has helped more than 700 high school students from 10 underserved schools in New York City get hands-on experience with geriatric care at the New Jewish Home in Manhattan and the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Gardens senior living facility in the Bronx. Ninety-nine percent of program participants graduate from high school, and more than 150 have gone on to college.
The advantages of the program are also evident for the New Jewish Home, which operates two nursing homes, senior housing and assisted living facilities and a home care business in the New York City area. By familiarizing young people with geriatric care careers, the system aims to address its growing need for workers as the tide of baby boomers enter their later years.
Six of the top 10 fastest-growing jobs in the decade leading up to 2029 are projected to be in health care, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, including home health and personal care aides.
“One of our biggest challenges is that there aren’t enough people who want to work in this industry,” said Dr. Jeffrey Farber, president and CEO of the New Jewish Home system. “People don’t want to work with older adults.”
The New Jewish Home began its career development program for teens 15 years ago with the idea of training and hiring them as nursing assistants, Farber said.
But it has become more than that. Working a few afternoons a week for three years with older adults, students gain insights into aging and develop relationships with residents, some of whom are assigned as mentors. It also gives students assistance with figuring out career goals and putting the pieces in place to get there.
“I think the students would be successful without us, but we provide the structure and resources to help them succeed,” said John Cruz, senior director of workforce initiatives at the New Jewish Home, who oversees the program.
Students generally must devote two afternoons after school every week and several weeks during the summer, said Cruz. The program curriculum, developed with Columbia University Teachers College, initially teaches students basics about patient privacy, Medicare/Medicaid and overcoming stereotypes about older people. By the time they’re seniors in high school, students can train as certified nursing assistants and work as paid interns supporting the residents on the days they spend at the facility.
As part of the program, students may also become certified in other jobs, including patient care technician, phlebotomist, EKG technician, and medical coding and billing staff.
The pandemic, however, changed things. The New Jewish Home in Manhattan was hit hard, with dozens of covid deaths at the 514-bed facility.
Since volunteers weren’t permitted inside the facility, the home instead hired many of them as part-time employees so they could continue to help seniors. This also gave students a chance to complete the clinical training portion of their certified nursing assistant coursework.
In addition to the program for high school students, the health system created a program in 2014 for people ages 18 to 24 who are unemployed and out of school, training them to become certified home health aides and nursing assistants. Nearly 200 have completed the program and the New Jewish Home has hired three-quarters of them, at a starting wage of $15 to $19 an hour.
Both programs are supported primarily by grants from foundations.
In February, the state announced that nursing homes could accept visitors again, following federal guidelines. But many nursing home residents still rely on virtual visits, and during the spring Jasmine spent her time helping them connect with their families and other loved ones by iPad or phone.
The isolation was hard on the residents, and students provided sorely missed company. Asked how the students helped her, resident Dominga Marquez, 78, said, “Just talk.”
“We are lonely,” said Marquez. “I have a lot of friends that used to come every week to visit but, with the pandemic, nobody came.”
Kennedy Johnson, 17, said helping seniors experience virtual visits with their families during the pandemic made him realize how much he takes for granted.
“With the pandemic and doing the virtual calls, seeing how these families don’t get to interact with their loved ones every day, that really opened my eyes,” he said.
Working at the New Jewish Home was the first time Kennedy had ever been in a nursing home or seen the kinds of work that staff members do.
In the fall, he will start at Morehouse College in Atlanta and plans to major in political science. His goal: “I want to be a health care attorney so I can represent people … like this.”
Published courtesy of KHN (Kaiser Health News) a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.
Nurse of the Week Ashleigh Lugar, a nurse in Waco, Texas, extended her nursing repertoire by spending a day as a hairdresser for 36 of her locked-down patients at the Heartis Senior Living Center.
As Director of Health Services at the Center, Lugar felt a deep sympathy for the plight of her isolated patients. Not only were they missing their regular haircuts, they were also in dire need of some one-on-one personal contact. On her Facebook account, Ashleigh noted, “The last three months have been hard, but harder for our residents. No family can visit. They have to eat in their apartments. We are not allowed to let a barber in to do hair. We are watching them decline mentally and physically…”
Older Americans living in senior residences have been suffering even when they escape the virus. In addition to being denied visits from their loved ones, many senior citizens are now living without social activities, community events, and services such as Meals on Wheels. Cut off from the embraces of family, and deprived of so many of the social interactions that help keep them grounded, the elderly are now more vulnerable than ever to severe depression.
After pondering the situation, Ashleigh came up with a unique way to treat her seniors to a combination of human contact and personal care. As she explained on Facebook, “I decided today to hang up my stethoscope and throw on a barber apron today. I am not licensed and did not charge for my services. But let me tell you after 3 months of no beautician it was time to step in. I did 36 haircuts and styles today. Watching my mom do hair the last 30 years paid off today. I didn’t have one unhappy resident. They were so thankful to just “feel like themselves again”. It felt so good to see them come back to life. 8 hours straight, no break didn’t even go in my office once today because I wanted to get as many as I could.”
Lugar was cheered when a local news outlet found her post and published a story, but she noted, “While the publicity is nice, I enjoyed the hugs and cards I got from my residents thanking me for what I did.”
Telehealth appointments with physicians. Family gatherings on Zoom and FaceTime. Online orders from grocery stores and pharmacies.
These have been lifesavers for many older adults staying at home during the coronavirus pandemic. But an unprecedented shift to virtual interactions has a downside: Large numbers of seniors are unable to participate.
Telehealth have-nots include older adults with dementia (14% of those 71 and older), hearing loss (nearly two-thirds of those 70 and older) and impaired vision (13.5% of those 65 and older), who can have a hard time using digital devices and programs designed without their needs in mind. (Think small icons, difficult-to-read typefaces, inadequate captioning among the hurdles.)
Many older adults with limited financial resources also may not be able to afford devices or the associated internet service fees. (Half of seniors living alone and 23% of those in two-person households are unable to afford basic necessities.) Others cannot make use of telehealth resources because they are not adept at using technology and lack the assistance to learn.
During the pandemic, which has hit older adults especially hard, this divide between technology “haves” and “have-nots” has serious consequences.
Older adults in the “haves” group have more access to virtual social interactions and telehealth services, and more opportunities to secure essential supplies online. Meanwhile, the “have-nots” are at greater risk of social isolation, forgoing medical care and being without food or other necessary items.
Dr. Charlotte Yeh, chief medical officer for AARP Services, observed difficulties associated with technology this year when trying to remotely teach her 92-year-old father how to use an iPhone. She lives in Boston; her father lives in Pittsburgh.
Yeh’s mother had always handled communication for the couple, but she was in a nursing home after being hospitalized for pneumonia. Because of the pandemic, the home had closed to visitors. To talk to her and other family members, Yeh’s father had to resort to technology.
But various impairments got in the way: Yeh’s father is blind in one eye, with severe hearing loss and a cochlear implant, and he had trouble hearing conversations over the iPhone. And it was more difficult than Yeh expected to find an easy-to-use iPhone app that accurately translates speech into captions.
Often, family members would try to arrange Zoom meetings. For these, Yeh’s father used a computer but still had problems because he could not read the very small captions on Zoom. A tech-savvy granddaughter solved that problem by connecting a tablet with a separate transcription program.
When Yeh’s mother, who was 90, came home in early April, physicians treating her for metastatic lung cancer wanted to arrange telehealth visits. But this could not occur via cellphone (the screen was too small) or her computer (too hard to move it around). Physicians could examine lesions around the older woman’s mouth only when a tablet was held at just the right angle, with a phone’s flashlight aimed at it for extra light.
“It was like a three-ring circus,” Yeh said. Her family had the resources needed to solve these problems; many do not, she noted. Yeh’s mother passed away in July; her father is now living alone, making him more dependent on technology than ever.
When SCAN Health Plan, a Medicare Advantage plan with 215,000 members in California, surveyed its most vulnerable members after the pandemic hit, it discovered that about one-third did not have access to the technology needed for a telehealth appointment. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services had expanded the use of telehealth in March.
Other barriers also stood in the way of serving SCAN’s members remotely. Many people needed translation services, which are difficult to arrange for telehealth visits. “We realized language barriers are a big thing,” said Eve Gelb, SCAN’s senior vice president of health care services.
Nearly 40% of the plan’s members have vision issues that interfere with their ability to use digital devices; 28% have a clinically significant hearing impairment.
“We need to target interventions to help these people,” Gelb said. SCAN is considering sending community health workers into the homes of vulnerable members to help them conduct telehealth visits. Also, it may give members easy-to-use devices, with essential functions already set up, to keep at home, Gelb said.
Landmark Health serves a highly vulnerable group of 42,000 people in 14 states, bringing services into patients’ homes. Its average patient is nearly 80 years old, with eight medical conditions. After the first few weeks of the pandemic, Landmark halted in-person visits to homes because personal protective equipment, or PPE, was in short supply.
Instead, Landmark tried to deliver care remotely. It soon discovered that fewer than 25% of patients had appropriate technology and knew how to use it, according to Nick Loporcaro, the chief executive officer. “Telehealth is not the panacea, especially for this population,” he said.
Landmark plans to experiment with what he calls “facilitated telehealth”: nonmedical staff members bringing devices to patients’ homes and managing telehealth visits. (It now has enough PPE to make this possible.) And it, too, is looking at technology that it can give to members.
One alternative gaining attention is GrandPad, a tablet loaded with senior-friendly apps designed for adults 75 and older. In July, the National PACE Association, whose members run programs providing comprehensive services to frail seniors who live at home, announced a partnership with GrandPad to encourage adoption of this technology.
“Everyone is scrambling to move to this new remote care model and looking for options,” said Scott Lien, the company’s co-founder and chief executive officer.
PACE Southeast Michigan purchased 125 GrandPads for highly vulnerable members after closing five centers in March where seniors receive services. The devices have been “remarkably successful” in facilitating video-streamed social and telehealth interactions and allowing nurses and social workers to address emerging needs, said Roger Anderson, senior director of operational support and innovation.
Another alternative is technology from iN2L (an acronym for It’s Never Too Late), a company that specializes in serving people with dementia. In Florida, under a new program sponsored by the state’s Department of Elder Affairs, iN2L tablets loaded with dementia-specific content have been distributed to 300 nursing homes and assisted living centers.
The goal is to help seniors with cognitive impairment connect virtually with friends and family and engage in online activities that ease social isolation, said Sam Fazio, senior director of quality care and psychosocial research at the Alzheimer’s Association, a partner in the effort. But because of budget constraints, only two tablets are being sent to each long-term care community.
Families report it can be difficult to schedule adequate time with loved ones when only a few devices are available. This happened to Maitely Weismann’s 77-year-old mother after she moved into a short-staffed Los Angeles memory care facility in March. After seeing how hard it was to connect, Weismann, who lives in Los Angeles, gave her mother an iPad and hired an aide to ensure that mother and daughter were able to talk each night.
Without the aide’s assistance, Weismann’s mother would end up accidentally pausing the video or turning off the device. “She probably wanted to reach out and touch me, and when she touched the screen it would go blank and she’d panic,” Weismann said.
What’s needed going forward? Laurie Orlov, founder of the blog Aging in Place Technology Watch, said nursing homes, assisted living centers and senior communities need to install communitywide Wi-Fi services — something that many lack.
“We need to enable Zoom get-togethers. We need the ability to put voice technology in individual rooms, so people can access Amazon Alexa or Google products,” she said. “We need more group activities that enable multiple residents to communicate with each other virtually. And we need vendors to bundle connectivity, devices, training and service in packages designed for older adults.”
Originally published by KHN (Kaiser Health News), a nonprofit news service covering health issues. KHN is an editorially independent program of KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation), which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
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