14 September 2021: Hochul urged not to repeat Cuomo's nursing home mistakes

Hochul urged not to repeat Cuomo's nursing home mistakes

Replacement New York Governor Kathy Hochul is being urged to take steps the Cuomo administration refused to consider in addressing the state's nursing homes:

In the first hours of her administration, Gov. Kathy Hochul pledged to strengthen basic transparency for public records requests and reporting during the pandemic. Her office began to emphasize data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on COVID-19 deaths, which is seen as more complete.

But lawmakers and advocates for nursing homes and long-term facilities in New York do not want her repeating the mistakes of her predecessor, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

"This is a tough issue and I get it, but unless we come together and have honest and tough conversations, how can we help our senior population in New York?" said Assemblyman Ron Kim, a Queens Democrat and vocal critic of Cuomo's handling of nursing homes....

Kim believes Hochul should go further, including meeting with nursing home family members of those who have died during the pandemic. He also called for a commission to review what went wrong in nursing homes, which would likely included a controversial March 2020 order that led to the transfer of COVID-19 positive patients into nursing homes and long-term care facilities.

At the same time, Kim wants the state to boost staffing in the facilities.

"We need to understand what it takes to attract new staff and retain them in this industry," he said. "That's going to take a lot of effort. The families and the workers are the ones who have the clear answers, because they're on the ground seeing the failures in real time."

Andrew M. Cuomo's administration had the problem that giving any attention to problems in New York's nursing homes would hang a lantern on the disastrous outcomes of its deadly 25 March 2020 directive and its subsequent cover-up of the excess COVID deaths that resulted from it.

Hochul doesn't have that problem, but she does have a limited window of time in which she can establish herself as part of the solution to the problems at New York's nursing homes before she, like Andrew M. Cuomo before her, becomes recognized as a contributor to them. Will she take the opportunity she's being handed?