Home Health Provider Feeling COVID-19 Heat: ‘We Are Not the Fire, We Are the Fire Department’

Posted: April 2, 2020

On Friday, Feb. 28, just after 10 p.m. PT, Brent Korte — chief home care officer at EvergreenHealth — got a call that changed everything. It was from his boss.

“She asked me if I was sitting down,” Korte told HomeHealthCareNews.com. “She told me that EvergreenHealth not only had patients who had tested positive for COVID-19, … but that a patient passed away in our hospital. This was the first death from COVID-19 in the United States.”

Based just outside of Seattle, EvergreenHealth is one of the largest home health and hospice providers in the Pacific Northwest. The not-for-profit provides about 250,000 visits per year and is affiliated with a local small hospital system.

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Evergreen's Korte on PPE

Korte recommends PPE conservation based around science. That means making tough choices and being prepared to defend them, while also communicating to staff that overprotecting now may mean no protection later.

But providers should also keep in mind that, as things change, so should their protocols.

“We started with N95 mask respirators for positive patients, and then we moved to droplet precautions, which are goggles, gloves, surgical masks and gowns,” Korte said. “Then we laid off the gowns for some patients; then we went to no masks for all visits; then to limiting visits; and then we chose to start limiting visits to [those] that are only clinically, essentially necessary in person.”

Those changes all happened over the course of 26 days. At the time of the webinar, Evergreen’s protocol was back to mandating surgical masks and droplet precautions for all patients because “infection rates have increased, and we’re trying to make sure that we’re not the vector,” Korte said.