| | | I was thinking Cuomo was sending them back to the nursing homes while still sick, supposedly to clear the hospital beds for the anticipated surge:
Even if they're still sick, if they are well enough to be discharged from the hospital and would be safe in a skilled nursing facility or assisted living or independent living, wherever is home, that's protocol. Facilities have a duty to not release patients to someplace not safe. That is the right of the patient. Now, as you suggest, they are not well enough to be discharged and would not be safe, that's another matter.
If they are infectious, again, they're going to a skilled nursing facility. What have we done all these years with flu patients, still infectious, going home? Do we keep patients in the hospital until they are no longer infectious even if they don't need that level of care? People go/stay home with the flu all the time.
If there's a paradigm shift here, it needs to be addressed directly with appropriate laws and protocols. Otherwise, it's business as usual.
Besides, where else would they go?
I'm operating in the abstract here, just noodling, not taking a position. It does, however, seem to me inappropriate to criticize hospitals or the health department for sending patients home or nursing homes for accepting them without deliberately identifying a different paradigm. When the situation changes, the rules need to be adjusted. The default is the status quo.
Another perspective.
I'm watching these things from a slightly different angle than most hereabouts. If I were ready to be released from a hospital and anyone cavalierly tried to unceremoniously dump me elsewhere, I would use my last breath to scream bloody murder. I have rights and I have a contract. Not to mention that I paid a small fortune as an entry fee. They are, by contract, stuck caring for me the rest of my life, even if I run out of money.
I don't see where "they" get the authority to move someone who resists out. Everyone's feeling their way along with this. It's full employment for lawyers.
Something related. There's a chain of nursing homes in the area, one in my town, that is in the news for designating one of their facilities, the one here, for covid and swapping residents in and out accordingly. The news has detailed one woman, non-covid, who is in the local facility and who has some serious medical treatment scheduled at local hospitals with local doctors and they were moving her some distance away. Her brother is wondering how to manage the logistics of that. I understand why the chain is doing what it's doing but it's not that simple. Not as simple as the "freedom" to go without a mask. |
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