RI nursing homes want more COVID testing as virus surges

A trade group representing nursing homes in Rhode Island is renewing its call for more COVID testing -- of hospital patients, of doctors and nurses, and of other people who come and go from nursing homes.

The Rhode Island Health Care Association said Monday that the state now only requires one negative coronavirus test before a hospital patient is sent to a nursing home. Over the spring, the association said, someone going from a hospital to a nursing home needed to test twice. But the state cut that back to one test in August.

“Bringing an unknown COVID positive patient through our doors to be quarantined puts residents and staff at risk as it raises the risk of spread in the home,” Scott Fraser, the association’s president and CEO, said in a news release. “Risking other people’s lives is not worth it.”

The association, which represents mostly for-profit nursing homes in the state, said that if someone is tested just once during their hospital stay, they could go weeks without being tested before their arrival at a nursing home. Last week an official with the state Department of Health “refused to reinstate the second test,” the nursing home association said.

The state argued that because someone coming from a hospital needed to quarantine for 14 days anyway, a second negative test wasn’t necessary, the association said. But the association said it disagrees.

The situation highlights two areas of concern for the state: keeping hospitals from being overwhelmed, and keeping nursing homes safe. Hospitals say they’ve had a hard time discharging patients into nursing homes because of COVID concerns, especially for COVID-positive people who need specialty nursing care, creating bottlenecks in the system.

During the first wave in the spring, hospitals were far from overwhelmed, even as nursing homes were battered by the virus.

This time around, though, hospitals are busier with normal, non-COVID traffic stretching them even more. And nursing homes are also starting to see major upticks in cases, with 320 new resident cases reported in the two weeks leading up to Wednesday.

In all, more than 3,500 nursing home residents have tested positive, and as of last week nearly 900 had died after contracting COVID-19. That represents about 70% of the COVID deaths in the state.

The association also asked the Department of Health to develop stronger testing policies for hospital workers, because COVID spread in hospitals might spill over into nursing homes, and some sort of testing program for people like lab techs and others who come in and out of the homes. Unlike nursing home workers, there’s no testing requirement for those sorts of healthcare professionals, the association said.

“The state is urging many to get tested so we can track this virus, yet key individuals in the healthcare profession are being left off the list,” Fraser said.

bamaral@providencejournal.com

(401) 277-7615

On Twitter: @bamaral44

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: RI nursing homes want more COVID testing as virus surges

___

(c)2020 The Providence Journal (Providence, R.I.)

Visit The Providence Journal (Providence, R.I.) at www.projo.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.