Alex Spanko

When I ran Skilled Nursing News, a trade publication covering the finance and business side of post-acute and long-term care, there was one reliable topic that would always boost website traffic: any new data about home health agencies capturing an increasing share of older Americans at the expense of nursing home census.

What is culture change? In 1997, when a group of diverse individuals from across the country founded what became Pioneer Network, that question wasn’t unusual. Nor was the question, What is person-centered care?

By Dr. Joycelyn Elders, Steve McAlilly, and Susan Ryan The COVID-19 pandemic laid bare the problems baked into America’s nursing home infrastructure. These issues – low pay for frontline staff, woefully outdated buildings, “semi-private” rooms housing up to four residents – should not have come as a surprise to those within the industry, but the stories of mass illness and death thrust the problems into the political and media mainstream like never before.