What happened to the nursing homes? What issues and potential fixes were brought up in COVID-19 outbreak teams? With the COVID-19 MINUTES study we closely followed nursing homes during the pandemic. Study about COVID-19-related measures and problems in nursing homes.
Nursing home organizations installed COVID-19 outbreak teams during the first months of the pandemic (February – April 2020), to be able to make quick decisions. As hardly any knowledge about COVID-19 was available, nursing home organizations expressed the need to learn from each other’s experiences, and national policymakers needed insight into what was going on in the sector.
In the “Covid-19 Management In NUrsing homes by crisis TEamS” (COVID-19 MINUTES) study, minutes of COVID-19 outbreaks teams of 41 Dutch nursing home organizations (with more than 500 nursing home locations in total) were collected from March 2020 to October 2021. From these minutes a group of researchers extracted measures taken and occurring problems on a weekly basis. We wrote (bi-)weekly summary reports, which we shared with the participating nursing home organizations and with national policymakers such as the ministry of Health Welfare and Sports. In addition, the content of the minutes was scientifically analysed using ‘content analysis’. Eight recurring topics in the crisis teams’ minutes were: crisis management, isolation and beds, personal protective equipment and hygiene, personnel, testing, vaccination, visiting, and wellbeing of residents and informal caregivers.
Foe a more in-depth exploration of the decisions described in the minutes, we also organized five rounds of in total thirteen panel conversations with diverse nursing home staff members (managers, physicians, nurses, support services, activity supervisors, etc) and client council members. These panels prioritized the measures they believe have been most important to prevent infections among nursing home residents, maintain well-being of residents, maintain staff scheduling and well-being, and to increase vaccination willingness among staff. The panel study was carried out based on the ‘nominal group technique.’ This panel study also provided insight into the decision-making processes of nursing home organizations with regard to the measures taken.
