THE NORTH CONWAY VISITING NURSE HOME CARE AND HOSPICE CONTINUES TO SERVE THE COMMUNITY
There are many heroes in our area and the Visiting Nurse Home Care and Hospice of North Conway employs many of them including Sandra Ruka, Executive Director. She says it’s a whole new world for the non-profit and its employees. “Coronavirus has definitely affected all our operations from office staff to clinical. We have very much a reduced workforce in the office. Everyone else is working remotely. Our clinicians are pretty much all working out seeing patients.” Sandra goes on to explain that the business itself hasn’t been affected by the virus; and that they’re fortunate to have kept their same level of service without turning anyone away for home service or hospice care. “However it is a vastly different world with everybody working remotely and following all the guidelines that we need to to protect our staff and our patients.”
The Visiting Nurse Home Care and Hospice provides a huge array of services from skilled nursing and home maker related duties to physical, occupational and speech therapy to end of life care. The need to visit client homes is inevitable. It’s one thing to practice social distancing, but what happens when home visits need to happen despite the pandemic? And what happens, especially, if Coronavirus is detected in the residence?
Executive Director Ruka outlines for us the protocol for Visiting Nurse Home Care and Hospice staff is to make those visits wearing full protective PPE gear and they help the families of the patients too. “Thanks to the effort of an amazing group of volunteers we’ve been able to provide cloth masks to all our patients and their family members.” Yesterday the organization’s first “dream team” started making an emergency supply of Tyvek protective gowns to ensure the safety of the clinical staff and clients.
In a recent post on the Visiting Nurse Home Care Hospice of Carroll County they thank their staff with the following message: “Thankful for our amazing staff selflessly serving the home care needs of our community during the COVID-19 pandemic. We celebrate and recognize the contributions of the nurses, home health aides, homemakers, support staff, social workers, therapists, and hospice workers who continue to provide care to clients in their homes and in keeping the office running smoothly. We would also like to extend our thanks to the volunteers who have made hundreds of masks to keep our staff and clients safe. We thank them for fulfilling our mission in these most difficult times, providing exceptional home health care enabling independent living and quality of life for our clients and their families.”
For more information about the Visiting Nurse Home Care and Hospice organization, please visit: www.vnhch.org.
