At press time, it will be just two weeks until our staff packs up and hits the roads/skies to make our way to Milwaukee for the 2022 EFA Conference + Expo. At last, we’ll be back on our traditional spring schedule and celebrating new beginnings with many of you.
And as we tiptoe out of the shadow of COVID-19, as much as feasible, it’s impossible not to reflect on where this industry has been over the past two years. Particularly, the weight that fell on skilled nursing is hard to comprehend—a top-of-mind issue for all of you and one that’s now landing national attention.
In his State of the Union speech on March 1, President Joe Biden announced a set of reforms to improve the safety and quality of nursing home care. It’s a response to what became so abundantly clear throughout the pandemic: substandard conditions in nursing homes put residents and staff at risk. Ultimately, more than 200,000 residents and staff in nursing homes died from COVID-19 (a quarter of all COVID-19 deaths in the U.S.).
Broadly, Biden’s initiatives focus on establishing minimum staffing requirements, holding communities accountable for their performance, and increasing transparency for the public. Specifically, one line item regarding the provision of safe, adequate, and dignified care calls for reducing resident room crowding, with private rooms the goal and phasing out those with more than three residents the first step.
As with any such sweeping reform, response has been both positive and negative. A key sticking point for many is the issue of staffing and the lack of funding to pay for additional workers, particularly as so many vacancies exist in the wake of COVID-19 and competition against other potential employers persists. This staffing crisis is one I know many of you have been mulling for some time, anticipating the types of environments that contribute not just to recruitment but to staff satisfaction and retention.
I think we’ve all known we’re on the precipice of major change in the senior living industry, and these reforms are just one signal that it’s begun. I can’t help but feel this is the perfect time for us to gather in Milwaukee to discuss where we head next. The design industry is in a unique position to inform the evolution, to guide solutions that might make those single-resident rooms a possibility or create campuses where employees will thrive.
And our goal is to ensure that Environments for Aging will be your partner along the way. I encourage you to dive into the conference program and soak up as much as you can. (And if you can’t make it to Milwaukee, watch for session recordings coming soon.) Keep turning the pages of the magazine, too, in which you’ll find our 26th annual EFA Design Showcase chock-full of new project examples capturing emerging design solutions and delivering lots of inspiration.
Meanwhile, if we cross paths in April, stop and say hi—we have a lot to discuss.
