This nursing home fears new infections, but is better prepared

Annet Rump (56) is at the door to the garden. The mouth mask comes off and she gasps. Fresh air, her lungs are calling for it. There is not much time: the residents of the Myosotis nursing home in Kampen come first. The door closes again and the cover on. Rump: “The heating will be turned on again here soon. I’ll give it to you. ”

The care provider works from the flex pool at Myosotis. She likes that because it brings her to different departments. “I was there on the first wave, and now that the second wave has arrived, I’m working again,” Rump sums it up. In between, she herself was ‘miserable and quite ill’. Rump was sick at home from the corona virus for eight weeks, then she went back to work slowly. “IJsselheem gave me plenty of time to recover.”

How she contracted the virus? Rump doesn’t know. It could have happened that morning in a ward for people with dementia. “A resident looked at me and suddenly coughed in my face. But it could just as well have happened at a different time. In any case, I became ill a few days later. ” No one wore mouth masks at the time. That is different now. Rump: “We are doing everything we can to keep the virus out now”.

Yet that will not work, everyone fears at IJsselheem, a care organization with fourteen nursing home locations, including Myosotis in Kampen. Chairman of the board Karin Leferink has no doubts about this. ‘Chef Corona’ and coordinator of the crisis team Joanne Kroes is also under no illusions. “Yes, we assume that.” Care worker Hendrik Jan Riesebos thinks that ‘the question is not whether someone will become infected, but when’. Hans van Splunter, whose 87-year-old father with dementia lives in ‘Myo’, is also sure. “It’s coming in again.”

Piano is not corona proof

Just look outside. The corona map of the Netherlands turns deep red. Last week, the number of infections in nursing homes doubled, with ten to fifteen nursing homes being added every day with a new corona infection. And that while everything is being done everywhere to prevent (re) introduction of the virus.

This is also the case by the employees and residents of the Myosotis nursing home (freely translated: forget-me-not). In the monumental building on the edge of the historic center of Kampen, elements of the former Kamper city hospital are visible, such as the old stone stairs and authentic long corridors. The colored stickers on the floor again do not have any historical context: everywhere is one-way traffic, most people stick to it.

The usual liveliness of a nursing home is now missing. Most residents stay on their own floor. The restaurant on the ground floor looks deserted. There are no parties or music evenings. The large wooden piano is covered with a piece of plastic: playing it is not ‘corona proof’.

Loneliness

Every morning there is a queue for a black tent in the garden between 9 and 10 am. All 2,400 IJsselheem employees can be tested for the corona virus. Sniff in the nose? To the tent. In the evening the results are in. The IJsselheem test facility, one of the first at a nursing home in the Netherlands, is crucial. Chairman of the Board Leferink: “In the summer I saw the crowds on the beaches of Scheveningen and we knew that employees would return from holidays where they had more contacts than in the previous months”. It was progressive insight, says Leferink, with of course the first wave clearly on her retina. Testing was not allowed in April.

In fact, the practice of that time now feels absurd. Colleagues with complaints just had to work. Catch a cold? To work. Dry cough? To work. You only stayed home when you had a fever of 38 degrees. 37.9 degrees? To work.

It is impossible to reconstruct what kind of misery that has caused. “The fact that people then continued to work may have been disastrous in retrospect,” says manager Bert Penninkhof. And the lack of protective equipment didn’t help either. Take the mouth caps, they didn’t wear them at first. The national cap guideline was strict for nursing home care, and according to the RIVM they were often ‘not necessary’. From April 17, IJsselheem has had enough: employees were still allowed to wear caps. “We have canceled city and country for it,” Penninkhof remembers well.

Because hardly any testing was done, it is not known exactly what damage the corona virus caused to IJsselheem. An estimated eighty residents (spread over all fourteen establishments where a total of eight hundred people live) died of the disease and hundreds of residents became infected. At least one in five employees got corona.

But not only the virus itself made victims, says geriatric medicine specialist Roland Westerink van IJsselheem. “The visitor stop had a lot of impact,” he says. For example, quite suddenly a number of residents died on the Koornmarkt after the virus had long disappeared. “Loneliness may have played a role in this. I think we have learned that it is not safe to lock the doors again. ”

Chef crown

Hans van Splunter still remembers standing at the top of the fire escape, on the outside of the building. He waved to his demented father. “Why don’t you come in,” father shouted. Me: that corona disease! What illness, he asked. Never mind, I thought. The door is locked, I shouted, but I saw he didn’t believe me. He couldn’t understand me anymore, turned and walked away angrily. That hurt a lot. ”

In the opinion of Van Splunter, who is also chairman of the Myosotis client council, his father has deteriorated rapidly due to the lockdown. But he doesn’t know for sure. “Dementia is progressive, it could also have been that disease.” Van Splunter is confident that he can continue to visit his father during the second wave. “The doors will not close again, the board promises. An oath has been sworn to that. ”

Indeed, says director Leferink, the doors will remain open during the second wave. In the summer the idea arose among mayors of being able to close nursing homes themselves in a crisis situation. Chairman of the board Leferink ran into Mayor Peter Snijders of Zwolle, who is also chairman of the IJsselland safety region.

“It’s great that you think you can, but that’s not going to happen. We remain in charge here, I said to Peter. ” The idea of ​​including the possibility of forced closure in the emergency ordinance was nipped in the bud.

Roaring in the car

Unlike in March and April, the nursing home is now better prepared for the corona virus, says ‘chief corona’ Joanne Kroes. Take the corona department on the ground floor. There is a room with people and materials ready to receive residents who become infected and cannot be quarantined, for example because they have dementia. Then they cannot infect fellow residents and still have freedom of movement. Until now, the department has been empty. Kroes: “Fortunately, no one has tested positive yet”.

Since the beginning of the crisis, the corona policy team including Kroes has met every Monday morning. The ‘chef corona’ ensures that scripts are ready and everyone in the organization is kept informed. Kroes thrives during a major crisis. “That might be strange to say when eighty residents have died. During the first wave I also sometimes roared in the car on my way home, after another day in which I got the worst reproaches thrown at my head. ”

Although corona brought a lot of trouble to Myosotis, lessons have also been learned. Kroes: “We will not go back to how it used to be, that’s for sure. In the wards with residents with dementia, for example, everyone could previously just walk in. During the first wave, we discovered that the visitor’s stop also gave peace of mind. Regulating visits to those departments is here to stay. ”