Uncle Intel Nursing Home New Pandemic

Hey so I thought I’d fill you guys in on a peculiar change that was recently announced. CMS aka the center for Medicaid and Medicare, who reimburses / pays different rehab and nursing home type facilities to care for sick patients and accredits those facilities and decides whether they pass or fail their annual inspections and can take in new patients etc came out with a brand new set of bizarre healthcare guidelines that I deem as being kind of a bad omen or a harbinger of some kind of impending disease outbreak. Whatever it is, I think it’s going to be in people’s body fluids. Right now the pieces are being set in place for us to have another possible pandemic.

The reason being that CMS is now requiring us medical workers in nursing home and rehab type facilities to wear protective splash gowns any time we come in contact with an IV, phlebotomy, a Trach, a tube feed, a catheter, a dressing change, a drainage bag. This new gown rule is to protect us from patients who don’t even have any contagious diseases-this is for all patients that have any wounds or anything in-dwelling. This is a highly unusual and overreaching move to make on otherwise healthy non-infectious patients.

Normally, our basic requirement is that we wear gloves and do regular handwashing. During covid we had added gown, mask, and face shield guidelines. Some places still require masks.

Gown usage, for us, is usually only assigned to people who have an illness that is contagious that requires the patient to be on isolation-usually either “droplet isolation precautions” or “contact precautions.” Droplet precautions would be things like covid and contact precautions would be things like MRSA on skin.

Not ever in 15 years have I seen a requirement where across the board we will start having to wear gowns for basically everything we do now. They want to see the changes by May. I don’t know what’s about to pop off but I suspect something kinda big. Also they want us to dispose of containers that held fluids, old dressings, used gowns, and any tube feed or Trach stuff in red biohazard bags to be incinerated, even for non-isolated, otherwise healthy non-infectious patients. This is also very not normal.

Normally in nursing homes we throw diapers in the regular trash, we throw foley bags in the trash, we change dressings and throw the old one in trash. We throw empty tube feed bags in the trash. We throw our gloves in the trash. We never ever have had to use red biohazard bags for all of our trash unless it’s for a patient with a contagious disease that requires isolation. (We have always used red biohazard sharps for needles etc, so that’s not changed.)

Do they know something we don’t?