1/30/2024 0 Comments Free Roadblock![]() Instead, it brought in extra clinicians like retired nurses to get the shot out to long-term care residents quickly. That initial vaccination campaign and improvements in infection control and treatment brought down the death rate.īiggs said the federal push didn’t rely solely on traditional pharmacy staffing. “It was an all hands on deck,” said Beth Biggs, a vice president at Consonus Pharmacy, a long-term care specialty pharmacy that helped lead the vaccination effort for seniors in Oregon. Kate Brown at Salem Health Edgewater Clinic in Salem, Ore., on Oct. That led to a vast push as part of the federal government’s Operation Warp Speed to get the shot into nursing homes and assisted living facilities.įILE: Medical assistant Norma Santana prepares a Moderna COVID-19 vaccine booster for then-Gov. In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, long-term care residents accounted for nearly half of all deaths nationally. “They don’t have the staff to come in for any kind of clinics for COVID injections,” Hubbard said.Īcross Oregon, it’s become difficult for long-term care communities to host their own vaccine clinics “because pharmacies are experiencing workforce shortages and are not readily sending pharmacists out,” said Rosie Ward, a spokesperson for the Oregon Health Care Association, the long-term care lobbying association. This September, when she contacted CVS and Rite Aid, they said that was no longer an option. In the past years, Hubbard had worked with pharmacies to set up on-site vaccination clinics so her residents could get the shot without having to leave home. Many residents have advanced Alzheimer’s, and some of them require medical transport to leave. But many of the residents of the Pearl can’t easily visit a pharmacy or a doctor’s office, according to Hubbard. Retail pharmacies and primary care offices generally offer the COVID-19 booster to Medicare enrollees for free. One possible solution for people living at long-term care facilities is to visit their local pharmacy or doctor’s office. Nursing homes are federally regulated and have higher-level medical staff who can directly bill Medicare for administering the COVID-19 shot to their residents.įILE: Blanca Rokstad, a certified nursing assistant at Rose Villa in Portland, shows her vaccination record after receiving the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine back in December 2020 when it first became available.īut assisted living facilities and memory care units are regulated by the state and cannot directly bill Medicare, creating a gap that has left many older Oregonians at risk of remaining unvaccinated through the winter.īecause Hubbard is a nurse and not a doctor or nurse practitioner, she can order the booster shot for her patients, and she’s qualified to stick the shot into an arm, but the Pearl’s memory care unit license doesn’t allow her to directly bill Medicare for the shots. In most cases, it’s supposed to be available free without a copay for people on Medicare or Medicaid. Moderna’s 2023-2024 booster costs $128 per dose. With the federal government no longer subsidizing all COVID-19 vaccines, Hubbard now needs to rely on federal reimbursements to cover the costs. A step in the virus’s evolution may have helped too, with the omicron variants circulating now generally causing more mild illness than the earlier delta variant.īut immunity tends to wane more quickly in older adults. Seniors, on the whole, embraced the initial COVID-19 vaccine, which helped reduce hospitalizations nationwide. A bureaucratic roadblockĪge remains the single most important risk factor for severe COVID-19 outcomes. If the state and federal government cannot make access to vaccines easier for vulnerable Oregonians, Hubbard worries she could start losing more residents to COVID-19 again, like in the early days of the pandemic. ![]() “There’s a huge percentage of people who are vulnerable, who can’t get this,” Hubbard said. Only about one in four residents in a memory care, nursing home, or assisted living has gotten the most recent COVID-19 booster shot, according to data from November published by the Oregon Health Authority. Many residents cannot easily leave, so Hubbard opted to give the booster doses herself after she couldn't get anyone from a pharmacy to administer the shots. Nurse Julie Hubbard in the hall of The Pearl at Kruse Way, December 2023. That’s because the latest booster shot that could protect older Oregonians has been slow to arrive for many living in long-term care facilities. But lately, Hubbard has been worried about a shorter-term threat to the health of her residents: COVID-19. ![]()
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