A local COVID-19 support platform for nursing homes: feedback and perspectives

Coulongeat, Matthieu; Aïdoud, Amal; Poupin, Pierre; Dubnitskiy-Robin, Sophie; Fougère, Bertrand

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a major impact on nursing homes (NHs), which were not prepared to manage infections among their at-risk patient populations. In order to comply with the French government’s guidelines, we rapidly set up a local support platform (LSP) to help NHs to manage their cases of COVID-19. The LSP comprised multidisciplinary decision support, a specialist phone hotline, mobile geriatric medicine teams, and videoconferences on COVID-19. We first quantified the LSP’s interventions in 63 local NHs since the start of the first wave of COVID-19 (March 2020): 9 instances of multidisciplinary decision support, 275 calls to the specialist phone hotline, 84 interventions by mobile geriatric medicine teams and 16 videoconferences. The LSP had been used during and between the first and second waves of the epidemic, and all had evolved to meet the NHs’ needs. In an anonymous online survey, we gathered feedback on the LSP from the NHs to which support had been provided. This initial feedback was important because the platform’s emergency implementation had prevented us from consulting the NHs about its design. The majority of the LSP’s actions were popular with nursing home staff, and all respondents wanted the LSP to continue after the COVID-19 crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed a number of pre-existing problems related to nursing home-hospital collaboration but the LSP made it possible to address some of these issues satisfactorily. Subject to further cost/benefit evaluation, our model of NH-hospital collaboration might help to improve the care provided to NH residents.