Aged care facility visits today - thoughts I had on the road (I love a road job). 1/8

We need an on-the ground infection control group who standardises the setup. Every single facility has different rules. The nurses who work at multiple every day must be going nuts. My pre-med background is in system usability and the different setups are melting my brain.

The good nursing homes really stand out. They know their residents, there's loads of activities for them, staff are available to assist which tells me they're not overloaded. They're also consistently physically smaller.

But mainly, the resident in nursing homes these days are much, much sicker. There's an annoying fallacy around that putting a loved one into care means abandonment. The converse is true, it's an act of love. (Also it's so expensive, why would you unless you absolutely had to).

Abandoning someone would be making them stay at home with needs that could not possibly be maintained by one person. Daily wound dressings, inability to walk or even roll over in bed, inability to eat, to go to the toilet or clean themselves after.

Once a fellow human reaches that point (and not all do), it takes a team of people, who get to go home from their shift to look after them. As a lone carer, you work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week with no break. If you get sick - what happens to them?

We've all seen the consequences of keeping a loved one at home who needed that team. But I digress. For all of you who've struggled with that guilt of placing a loved one - you've kept them safe, and warm, and fed. And loved. It's rarely perfect, but home isn't either.

Looking after the survivors of our society at their most vulnerable is a privilege for all of us in geriatrics. Today seeing my patients, now also survivors of covid, I was heartened to see that we are doing well in this space, as much as we have still have a long way to go.