As Nebraska slowly rolls out coronavirus vaccinations across the state, a new project aims to address the mental health of the people who have spent months protecting the state’s most vulnerable: staffers at nursing homes and other long-term care facilities.
“We really recognize the incredible stress our long-term care facilities are undergoing — they’re dealing with a highly contagious virus that is deadly to the population they serve,” said Quinn Lewandowski, a research specialist at the University of Nebraska Public Policy Center.
The stress, he said, involves dealing with residents in quarantine, unable to accept visitors or go on outings; extra protective gear and other precautions to avoid transmitting the virus at work and at home; and sometimes the loss of lives in their care.
As of early January, data reported to the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services indicated that more than 40% of COVID-19 deaths in Nebraska involved nursing home residents, and that didn’t include reports from other types of long-term care such as assisted living.
The Public Policy Center partnered with the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services to win a $174,000 federal grant aimed at decreasing risks from long-term care job stress, which can include burnout, anxiety, depression, use of alcohol or drugs to cope and thoughts of suicide.
Other partners in the project include Leading Age Nebraska, an association of 70 nonprofit providers of long-term care, and the University of Nebraska Medical Center, which already had a coordinator touching base with leaders of long-term care facilities.
The grant project is proposing to train, for free, an individual in each of up to 50 facilities in the life-saving practice of Question, Persuade and Refer. Those trained learn to recognize the signs of crisis and suicide and how to properly approach someone, have a supportive conversation and refer them to help. They then will train co-workers in QPR, eventually reaching 1,250 long-term care staff.
Enrollment is open to any long-term care facility in the state, and facilities can register at https://go.unl.edu/FrontlineQPR.