Home Health & Hospice Week

OASIS suspended for directly impacted.

Home care providers have been smack dab in the middle of Hurricane Katrina as both victims and rescuers.

Thousands of home care employees and tens of thousands of home care patients were displaced by the storm (see Eli's HCW, Vol. XIV, No. 31). Home care worker Sarah Johnson yelled for help for her elderly, frail patient outside the New Orleans Convention Center Sept. 1 in a widely run photo from the Houston Chronicle.

Home care worker Pamela Franklin Carter and her family left New Orleans with just a few changes of clothes and have been living in a Shreveport, LA budget motel, according to the Sacramento Bee.

And home care business owner Linda Magee and her family left New Orleans without even that much, reports the Houston Chronicle. "Not even a pair of tennis shoes," Magee told the paper. She plans to relocate to Houston for at least a year.

But home care providers are also among those who are offering their assistance. Houston home care worker Betty Lewis showed up at the Astrodome Aug. 31 determined to help out, even though officials would not let her in. "I'm not going to be leaving. I'm getting in there," Lewis told the Chronicle.

Photographs of visiting nurses administering tetanus shots to victims and relief workers have run in multiple newspapers. Home Care Associations Set Up Task Force To coordinate the home care industry's relief efforts, the National Association for Home Care & Hospice has created a hurricane task force. The group petitioned the governors of the affected states to classify home care personnel as emergency responders and to place home care providers at the top of the list for rationed gasoline, among other things.

The task force also petitioned the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services for relief from certain Medicare Conditions of Participation and payment rules.

Home care staff interested in volunteering should contact task force co-chair Barbara Citarella at RBC Limited by email at rbc@netstep.net, NAHC says.

HHS says it needs volunteers including those who are administrators, finance officers, nursing assistants, chaplains, social workers, pharmacists, dieticians, respiratory therapists, RNs, housekeepers, LPNs, supply managers and mental health workers. Volunteers who can withstand field conditions can sign up at https: //volunteer.hhs.gov or by calling toll-free number 1-866-KAT-MEDI.

HHS will pay volunteers travel costs and a per diem, but no salary, the agency says in a release.

CMS says "health care providers that furnish medical services in good faith, but who cannot comply with normal program requirements because of Hurricane Katrina, will be paid for services provided and will be exempt from sanctions for noncompliance, unless it is discovered that fraud or abuse occurred."

Home care providers that can't volunteer [...]