Overall, veterans in the long-term care field believe the aging services sector is recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic. But they don’t necessarily agree on where that recovery is at.
During a special McKnight’s Veteran VIP Conversation at the 2024 McKnight’s Pinnacle Awards event, a panel of senior living and other long-term care leaders talked openly about the sector’s successes and challenges in the wake of a global pandemic.
Roberto Muñiz, president and CEO of Piscataway, NJ-based Parker Health Group and LeadingAge board chair, said that the long-term care industry has partially recovered from COVID-19, in respect to knowing how to deal with it. But he doesn’t think that recovery has been fast enough or even “enough, period.”
“The post-COVID situation put us in a very different place,” said Muñiz, a Pinnacle Inspiration Award winner. “We cannot find people [to work].”
Many potential employees have little interest in senior living or other areas of long-term care as a career, leaving organizations without needed staff to provide services. As a result, communities and facilities are closing because they cannot afford to provide services. It’s a situation that was exacerbated by the pandemic, he said.
Andrew Carle, an adjunct and lead faculty member for Georgetown University’s administrator training program, said he sees the sector’s recovery as multifaceted. Inquiries on the demand side for senior living — independent living, assisted living and memory care — very quickly have exceeded pre-pandemic inquiry volume. Carle attributed it to the fact that older adults were isolated for two years.
“The World Health Organization already said loneliness was an epidemic before the pandemic,” said Carle, a Pinnacle Industry Ally Award winner. “That alone drove a lot of people to immediately think about senior living as soon as there was a vaccine.”
As difficult as congregate living was during the pandemic, Carle said, residents had access to meals, happy hours and other virtual activities that countered isolation.
Clif Porter, senior vice president of government relations for the American Health Care Association / National Center for Assisted Living, insisted that providers are still feeling the pandemic’s effects.
“My biggest concern, at least what I view as my full-time job, is reminding Congress and every policymaker that we haven’t recovered, and that the worst cataclysm in the last 100 years just happened a few years ago and it hit our shores directly,” Porter, a Pinnacle Ally Award winner said. “As much as folks want to move on, and the rest of the country wants to move on, and the rest of healthcare wants to move on and look away and say that’s behind us, we have to keep reminding them that we’re not and why.”
Changing up the senior living model
Carle advocated for a paradigm shift toward more dynamic and inclusive living arrangements, such as university retirement communities, to address stagnant market penetration rates.
”The baby boomers have zero interest in being set off to the side because of an age thing,” he said. “We have to eliminate ‘elderly islands’ and take it to the next level.
Carle said it’s time to give older adults what they’re asking for: active, intellectually stimulating, intergenerational living.
