Home Health & Hospice Week

Neglecting vaccination of home care workers is dangerous, reps warn.

Home health and hospice workers must have improved access to the COVID-19 vaccine, industry representatives told the Biden-Harris administration as they came into office.

“It is critical for hospice and palliative care providers, just like hospital staff, to be given priority access to COVID-19 vaccines,” the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization said in a Jan. 15 letter to then-President Elect Joe Biden. “This is not only for the safety of the interdisciplinary team but for the patients, families, and community members they encounter across every community in the United States every single day,” the trade group exhorted.

“The hospice and palliative provider sector is serving tens of thousands of patients with active COVID-19 infections, with over 70 percent of hospice providers reporting COVID-19 infected patients in service in our most recent survey. Prioritizing vaccinations for frontline hospice and palliative care staff and the high needs individuals they serve as well as their caregivers will be critical in achieving the goal of slowing or eliminating community spread of the virus,” NHPCO said in the letter.

Visiting Nurse Associations of America Acting President Katie Smith Sloan had a similar message for the incoming COVID-19 coordinators Jeffrey Zients and Dr. Bechara Choucair. “More than half (53%) of COVID-19 deaths among adults 65+ were outside of nursing homes,” Smith Sloan pointed out in a Jan. 13 letter to the officials. “The process to get [home health] staff vaccinated has been uncoordinated, slow, and dependent on either personal relationships with state and local governments, or relationships or affiliations with hospitals/health care systems, rather than a systematic process,” said Smith Sloan, who is also CEO of LeadingAge.

“At a minimum, clinics should be offered specifically for health care workers affiliated with home and community-based care in as many geographic locations as is feasible,” the VNAA head exhorted. “Ideally, organizations should have the opportunity to schedule vaccine clinics at their administrative offices.”

NHPCO also advocated for many changes ranging from better personal protective equipment (PPE) access to payment for concurrent care to elimination of the six-month prognosis requirement for the hospice benefit.