Home Health & Hospice Week

Home care providers have been undertaking valiant measures to help patients impacted by Hurricane Sandy.

Resourceful nurses, physical therapists, aides and other home care personnel surmounted flooding, impassable roads, downed trees and dwindling gasoline to get to their patients, reports National Public Radio. "It's just been incredible to see everybody step up, even though they themselves have been without child care, school's not in session, their homes are cold, they don't have much food, they're having to wait in line for hours and hours for gasoline," Dr. Steve Landers of VNA Health Group of New Jersey told the radio program. "I'm sort of speechless. It's just amazing."

"I've been in very close contact with agencies throughout New Jersey and it's amazing what people are doing," added Sherl Brandt of the Home Care Association of New Jersey. "I don't know of any cases where people didn't get needed care." Home care staffers provided services ranging from delivering a baby for a woman stuck in traffic to driving a kidney failure patient to a distant dialysis center.

Visiting Nurse Association of Long Island nurses walked to their patients' homes, the VNA's Orael Keenan told NPR.

Eloise Goldberg of the Visiting Nurse Ser-vice of New York worked on figuring out how to get 11,000 home health aides and 3,500 clinicians to their patients after the storm. "We had been preparing our field staff for several days so they would have cellphone connections with their patients, but now we were up against massive flooding and blackouts and fires," Goldberg told Newsweek magazine.

In the Rockaways, one VNA nurse walked seven blocks through knee-high water to get to a group home, Newsweek says. Another walked up 12 flights to administer medication and calm the patient, who, like tens of thousands of others, was sitting in the dark with no TV, water or gas service.

Durable medical equipment providers made sure to make deliveries ahead of the storm so patients would have necessary oxygen and other items. And some, like Metrostar Home Health Products in Brooklyn, N.Y. have been collecting other items for victims. Metrostar has run a clothing, food, water, and fund drive for impacted New Yorkers, it says on its website. Thousands of homeless residents lack basic necessities, the supplier says.

Fuel shortages seem to be the biggest problem many home care providers in New York and New Jersey must conquer. But in New Jersey, home care agencies say state fuel depots are filling their tanks once emergency vehicles are taken care of. At gas stations, some nurses have been able to go to the head of the line when they show their ID and explain the situation, the radio program says.

"The suspension of transit services, power outages, evacuation efforts, and traffic congestion in New York City resulting from the Hurricane have had an enormous impact on the provision of home care services," the Home Care Association of New York State notes in a release.