Home Health & Hospice Week

You may become your patients' first and only line of defense. Home care agencies and hospices were woefully under prepared to handle the onslaught of H1N1 cases that erupted earlier this year, according to the recent "Planning for an Influenza Pandemic in the Home Health Care Sector" Web conference. While agencies' preparation for a pandemic paid off, "we ran out of gloves, masks, gowns, alcoholbased hand-washing solution," Barbara Citarella, founder and president of RBC Limited in Staatsburg, N.Y., shared in the conference, which was sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Though "we had done a lot of preparing, we still were not as prepared as we probably needed to be or could have been," she said. Worse: When agencies ran out of supplies and personal protective equipment, they weren't quickly able to restock. And "surge capacity became a moving target," so agencies were never sure how many [...]