Mortal Curiosity
2022 End-Of Life
Virtual Conference Series
Nursing Home Residents' Autonomy in the Time of Covid April 21st, 2022 | 6-7pm (MST)
How has the pandemic upended the lives and autonomy of nursing home residents?
Journalist and author Ann Neumann spent March and April of 2020 in Philadelphia, a city with one of the oldest, low-income communities of color in the country, reporting on systemic problems within the nursing home industry. Then Covid struck the facilities she had visited. What Neumann found was that the very same chronic problems that residents and experts had identified before the pandemic were the direct cause of the tragic number of deaths that took place across the country: the bouncing of patients from one facility to another because of payment rates; tragically low staffing; and business fraud.
During her presentation, Neumann will talk about the history of the industry's challenges, advocates' decades-long efforts to improve them, the unauthorized use of hydroxychloroquine in the early days of Covid, and the effects on elders who depend on these facilities for their care before, during, and after the pandemic.
Presented by: Ann Neumann
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Ann Neumann
Ann Neumann is a journalist and author of The Good Death: An Exploration of Dying in America (Beacon). A former hospice volunteer, she has written about end-of-life care, aging, and religion for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, Harper's magazine, The Baffler, The Guardian, and other publications, including Guernica magazine, where she is a contributing nonfiction editor.