Nursing-home and Covid-19: What have we learnt?

Abstract

People living in care-homes has been Covid-19 pandemia’s preferential victims. Our aim is to offer some reflexions about it: 1) Nursing-home problems related to Covid-19 were detected to late. Legal supervisors of these centers, CCAA, were, probably, negligent. 2) Residential centers are a very heterogeneus world from any point of view we should take into account: size, institutional dependency, number and qualification of health and non-health workers, resources, functional protocols, etc. We can not consider them as an unitariam group, 3) Health vulnerability is the rule. Many reasons help to understand it: high age (mean about 90 y,), presence of chronic diseases, rates of physical and mental dependency, need of intensive help for daily living’s activities, etc. They live in closed spaces, with many common activities, and difficulties for isolation. Social ageism has added another perverse factor. The result has been a very high rates of mortality. 4) A key point to understand the past and to prevent future similar events, would be to analyce the degree of medicalization each nursing-home needs. 5) We must learn from this experience and we must change many of our previous standard thoughts regarding the functional approach to this sort of setting.