Nursing Home Care during the COVID-19 Pandemic
A special issue of International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (ISSN 1660-4601). This special issue belongs to the section "Nursing".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 October 2023) | Viewed by 16377
Special Issue Editors
2. Institute for Public Health and Nursing Research, University of Bremen, 28359 Bremen, Germany
Interests: quality of care; health economic evaluations; dementia
2. SOCIUM—Research Center on Inequality and Social Policy, University of Bremen, 28359 Bremen, Germany
Interests: long-term care; health economics; health policy; demography; comparative welfare state research; health services research
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Currently, COVID-19 is the biggest challenge for health systems worldwide. Older people are particularly vulnerable to this disease as they face a high risk of severe forms of the disease and a high mortality when infected with SARS-CoV-2. With the worldwide number of people aged 80 years and older having doubled since the 1990s and exceeding 126 million people today, the protection of the elderly has been a priority over the last year. Within the group of the elderly, care-dependent people living in nursing homes have been particularly effected; in 2020, in western countries half of all deceased persons with COVID-19 have been living in long-term care facilities. To make matters worse, nursing staff in nursing homes also have a much higher risk of infection. Measures of social distancing, which until the availability of vaccination have been the primary coping strategy, are not easily applicable for care-dependent people.
The way different countries and organizations met these challenges has varied considerably, among other things being dependent on the availability of protective materials and tests as well as institutional factors, e.g., the qualification of staff. Social distancing often caused new problems and risks for care-dependent persons and even novel promising efforts like vaccination programs still carry lots of open questions, e.g., the duration of acquired immunity, effectiveness regarding virus mutations, or being still infectious to others despite vaccination.
This Special Issue of the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (IJERPH) focuses on the situation of nursing homes during the pandemic. Research papers, reviews, and case reports are welcome. We invite you to submit research on single countries and certain periods, but also papers comparing countries, regions, or different waves of the pandemic. The contributions may be descriptive in nature but also evaluative. Papers dealing with best practice approaches to face the pandemic are also welcome. Other manuscript types accepted include methodological papers, position papers, brief reports, and commentaries. We will accept manuscripts from different disciplines including public health and nursing sciences, epidemiology, health services research, health economics, and social sciences in general.
Here are some examples of topics that could be addressed in this Special Issue:
- Covid-19-related morbidity and mortality in nursing homes
- Social distancing in nursing homes: intended and unintended effects
- Strictness and timeliness of preventive measures in nursing homes
- Social Distancing, testing, and vaccination – a different answer for each wave?
- How do measures for nursing homes relate to those for the rest of the population?
Prof. Dr. Karin Wolf-Ostermann
Prof. Dr. Heinz Rothgang
Guest Editors
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Keywords
- COVID-19
- caregiver
- long-term care
- nursing home care
- nursing staff
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