Burnout prompts thousands to leave senior health care field
Ohio senior care worker recounts working during COVID-19 pandemic
Bob Pontius, who has worked in the senior living industry, recounts what it was like working during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Editor’s note: This story is part of a series about how life has changed five years after the onset of the COVID pandemic.
Bob Pontius of Stow has worked in the senior care industry for more than 20 years, including at the former Stow-Glen and for Danbury Senior Living. However, in November, he pivoted to another kind of senior care business, Home Instead, which helps provide care services for seniors in their homes.
COVID-19 and its aftermath prompted the change, said Pontius, who is chief operating officer at Home Instead in Oakwood. The pandemic forced a lot of longtime workers in senior living to quit.
“It burned out so many,” he said. “It burned me out. We lost thousands and thousands of employees due to the pandemic.”
According to a study released last year by the American Health Care Association, 7 out of 10 nursing homes say they have fewer employees than they did before the pandemic. Almost all of the 441 facilities surveyed said they had open positions to fill.
The assisted living and nursing home industry is slowly recovering in terms of staff, as the field attracts and trains new employees, Pontius said.
“In a way it’s good because we have a lot of newly trained people, but we lost a lot of our veterans,” he said. “The pandemic was the straw that broke their backs.”
A silver lining to the pandemic, Pontius said, was seniors and their families embracing technology more to communicate.
“At the beginning of the pandemic, families and residents were very leery of electronic communication,” he said. “On the inside, our receptionists were constantly overloaded with phone calls to be transferred to the apartments. Families have since been much more reliant on direct communication with the residents via the use of cellphones and video call devices.”
One change Pontius said he noticed was that the age of seniors being admitted into a care facility has gone up considerably.
“One of the biggest impacts has been an increase in a senior’s reluctance to move to a care community,” he said. “Everyone is afraid of a ‘lockdown, no visitation’ situation again so they are utilizing home care resources more creatively. The average age of a new resident in an assisted living has climbed to 85. Ten years ago, it was closer to 78 to 80.”
In December, Gov. Mike DeWine signed House Bill 236, known as the “Never Alone Act,” which prohibits care facilities from denying patients or residents access to an advocate during public health emergencies. It was passed in response to multiple hospitals and care facilities limiting and restricting visitors at their facilities during the pandemic. It becomes effective March 20.
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