Home All Alone
Hospital industry peddling programs to treat acute-care patients in their homes
Nursing is a highly-skilled profession that is based on scientific knowledge and attention to detail. It demands an ability to combine the physical, psychological, and emotional needs of a patient with compassion, empathy, and advocacy to honor the dignity in all people.
Home All Alone programs are directly opposed to this hands-on human to human approach to nursing. The hospital industry has long wanted to automate a skilled, science-based profession by reducing people to a list of symptoms that are measured by technology that is proven to be racially and ethnically biased, and does not take into account the individual patient.
Covid has opened up the hospital industry’s desire to normalize remote and automated care in order to decentralize patient care. As care is taken out of the hospitals, industry players will close hospitals to increase profits and leave more and more communities without full-service acute care hospitals.
Medicare’s Hospital at Home Program is Dangerous for Patients
National Nurses United's report on Medicare's Acute Hospital Care at Home (AHCaH) program explains how such programs cannot provide acute hospital-level care in a patient's home because it lacks the ongoing, in-person assessment and treatment by health care professionals, which is a hallmark of acute-level care. The report states that the AHCaH program fails to provide the appropriate level of services, equipment, and infrastructure to provide timely acute hospital-level care and it is vulnerable to fraudulent billing practices.
Don’t Try This At Home
The national hospital industry is peddling programs to treat acute-care patients in their residences, instead of in the hospital where they belong.