Home Care Providers Disappointed at Gov. Raimondo’s Handling of COVID-19 at Six-Month Mark

Home Care Providers Disappointed at Gov. Raimondo’s Handling of COVID-19 at Six-Month Mark

Nicholas Oliver, Executive Director for the Rhode Island Partnership for Home Care (“The Partnership”), issues the following statement expressing disappointment in the handling of the COVID-19 public health emergency by Governor Gina Raimondo (D-RI) as Rhode Island approaches the six-month mark tomorrow, Wednesday, September 9, 2020:

“Rhode Island’s home care and hospice providers have received very little support from Governor Raimondo’s administration over these past six months. These providers for over 20,000 patients have received an unsustainable amount of personal protective equipment for its over 7,800 frontline workers. None of the $1.25 billion federal CARES Act state aid funding have directly reached home care and hospice providers, unlike other long-term care providers within the state. We have frontline workers at high-risk for contracting and spreading the virus by the nature of their work visiting homes and entering into elder high-rises, assisted living facilities and nursing homes. We generated emergency operating guidelines when our Department of Health was silent and offered no guidance. We have up to 70 medically fragile children across the state using home care that do not know if they can participate in school next week because decisions have not been made as to how their nursing care will be provided during school hours. Governor Raimondo, Health Director Alexander-Scott, Labor Director Jensen, Commerce Secretary Pryor and Education Commissioner Infante-Green have not engaged with home care and hospice providers directly at any point during these past six months.

What we have seen over the past six months is the use of CARES Act funding like a lottery windfall to support allies and donors of the Governor, including consulting firms with nondescript services rendered to the state and promoting inadequately screened Care.com workers to vulnerable homebound Rhode Islanders. Now, the Governor is attempting to pacify her top union supporters by devaluing the nurse assistant licensure and promoting workforce entry into a program that has failed to launch over the past couple of years. Her administration is luring nurse assistants with a $1,500 CARES Act state aid bonus that has nothing to do with our COVID-19 response and allowing them to operate with less supervision and oversight and under a similar scope of practice.

We need stronger leadership from the Governor and her administration to protect vulnerable homebound Rhode Islanders and value frontline workers that have been operating without the Governor’s financial support or meaningful appreciation during this public health emergency.”

About Rhode Island Partnership for Home Care: Established in 1990, the Rhode Island Partnership for Home Care (“The Partnership”) represents home care, home nursing care and hospice agencies licensed by the Rhode Island Department of Health to serve patients and clients in every Rhode Island community. As the only association in our state to promote access to quality home healthcare, The Partnership is committed to promoting quality home healthcare service delivery, ethical healthcare business practices and positive patient and client outcomes to ensure that access to home care and hospice remains an integral component of our post-acute and long-term healthcare system. For more information about The Partnership, please contact (401) 351-1010 or www.riphc.org.