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How to Thrive in Growing Long-Term-Care Market (Part 1)

ALM presentation highlights business opportunities

WESLEY CHAPEL, Fla. — As Americans get older and stays at hospitals get shorter, long-term care is a solution that will see much growth in the future, according to Amanda Lobb, RLLD, formerly director of Calderon Textiles’ healthcare division. This means there may be new opportunities for laundries to process linens for these facilities. Doing so, though, will mean that businesses will need to become familiar with long-term care and its unique requirements.

Lobb spoke on the topic at the Association for Linen Management’s most recent annual educational conference, in a presentation titled New Business Opportunities in Long-Term Care.

LONG-TERM CARE BASICS

While the average hospital stay may last anywhere from a couple of days to up to a month, a resident’s time in a long-term-care facility can be much longer.

“When you think about long-term care, this is where people go to ultimately live and die. So it’s not just three days, or 10 days, or five days. It can be three years to 10 years,” Lobb explains.

To classify long-term care a little further, Lobb describes three main kinds: Skilled nursing, for individuals who need help with all aspects of everyday living, including feeding, bathing, changing, etc.; assisted living, for those who need help with some everyday tasks; and independent living, which allows individuals to live as they normally would while a loved one gets the care they need. There’s also hospice, where Lobb says the emphasis lately has been to bring comfort and help individuals have a more “dignified end.”

“I applaud anyone who can work in long-term care every day,” says Lobb. “It’s a very heart-wrenching situation.”

Though acute care and long-term care have traditionally been different markets run independently of each other, hospitals and nursing homes have begun to form partnerships that aim to help both meet the increasing regulatory requirements.

Lobb says both kinds of facilities are learning to understand and communicate with each other, and are building on reciprocal accountability. This open communication and partnership will help both acute care and long-term care ensure that patients are getting the treatment they need, and that they don’t end up back in the hospital due to mistakes made at a long-term-care facility.

Lobb says that as it currently stands, healthcare—and long-term care in particular—is the most highly regulated industry, second only to space travel. Expect that long-term care will become even more regulated than it already is.

“So when we talk about state [inspections] and we talk about surveys, it’s huge and it’s constant, and it’s constantly changing,” she says.

For example, in the past, individuals could bring items such as linens from their homes to a long-term-care facility, but the future may bring tighter controls on such practices, she explains.

“From an infection control perspective, things are going to change,” Lobb adds. “That’s going to be an opportunity for [commercial] laundry, because right now in assisted living, you bring your own things.”

An important feature of long-term care is its focus on the quality of life of the individual, and its goal to let people live their lives as they choose.

“In long-term care, the keyword is person-centered care,” Lobb asserts. “When I go there to live, I expect to be able to eat dinner when I want to eat dinner. I expect to be able to bathe when I want to bathe, not when you tell me to.”

DIFFERENCES IN LINEN DISTRIBUTION

On the surface, it may seem like servicing long-term-care clients would be quite similar to processing linens for hospitals and other healthcare facilities. Not so, Lobb says. There are a number of factors that launderers will need to take into consideration before jumping into this market.

Distribution of linen, for example, can differ from how it may be done in a hospital. In long-term-care facilities, laundries may be delivering smaller carts or smaller amounts of linen to “lots of little places,” such as various campuses in a wide regional area, some of which may have narrow docks and cramped entryways, making delivery a challenge.

Additionally, a nursing home may not have a dedicated individual to manage linen deliveries. For some businesses picking up long-term-care accounts, there may be a need to hire more employees to help with the increased business and to help manage pickup and delivery, according to Lobb.

“Someone’s going to have to get that linen out of the resident room and to you,” she warns. “So you may have to learn to manage labor at 34 different locations if you pick up that nursing home chain.”

Storage, too, may be difficult. Lobb says nursing homes are notorious for having little to no storage space. Hoarding is a major problem, too, exacerbated by that lack of storage.

“They’re hiding linen everywhere you can think of, and we’re taking it all over the place. We’ve got a closet here and a closet there,” says Lobb. “If you think they hide linen in a hospital, you’ve seen nothing.”

Check back Thursday for the conclusion! 

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Have a question or comment? E-mail our editor Matt Poe at [email protected].