Those deaths occurred at the Wanaque Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation in Haskell and were attributed to an outbreak of adenovirus. The new policies will cover facilities for pediatric and senior patients alike.
They include protocols to keep infected patients apart from the staff and other residents, make lab tests easier to get and to keep family and officials alike aware of what’s going on when there is an outbreak.
“We want requirements for specifically those nursing homes with ventilator beds and so we’re just talking about just shy of about 2 dozen nursing homes in the state,” Health Commissioner Dr. Shareef Elnahal said.
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Many of the policies were ordered in the wake of the Wanaque outbreak.
“A lot of it sounds like common sense. It’s just harder to execute consistently for every resident or every patient at the point of care,” Elnahal added, “which is why we are going to require that for these facilities to make sure that when we send a surveyor or inspector that, if they’re not doing it for even one resident, they can be cited for it.”
To drive the point home even more, measures have been introduced in the legislature to make many of these policies state law.