AARP Oklahoma Urges Gov. Stitt to Update Long-Term Care Facility Visitation Policies, Protect Residents’ Rights

AARP Oklahoma sent the following letter to Gov. Kevin Stitt regarding the Oklahoma State Department of Health’s recent revision to nursing home visitation rules. AARP Oklahoma requests that the Oklahoma State Department of Health institutes new guidance released by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to stringently enforce residents’ rights to visitation. We also encourage the Oklahoma State Department of Health to apply these requirements to all facility types to end confusion among residents and their loved ones on when and how they can visit with each other.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has been especially hard on those living in long-term care settings. The effects of both the virus and social isolation have been devastating to residents and their loved ones,” said AARP Oklahoma State Director Sean Voskuhl. “Visitation by friends and family has been a hallmark of the accountability system in long-term care facilities. Unfortunately, many facilities have been denying this basic principle for far too long. We must ensure that residents’ rights are intact and call upon our state leaders to make the necessary changes to make that happen.”

As we enter a new phase of this pandemic with the ongoing rollout of vaccines and growing knowledge about public health needs – including the safety, mental health, and social well-being of nursing home residents -- it is vital that these vulnerable seniors are able to safely visit with their loved ones. Residents must be able to exercise their rights to visitation, and facilities should be held accountable for ensuring such visits occur. AARP Oklahoma will continue fighting to improve the quality of care in nursing homes and other long-term care facilities during this global health crisis and into the future.

Letter to Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt:

March 15, 2021

Dear Governor Stitt,

On behalf of AARP Oklahoma’s nearly 400,000 members, thank you for your leadership in protecting our older adults and those most at risk during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially seniors and people with disabilities living in long-term care facilities, like nursing homes and assisted living facilities.

We appreciate your March 9, 2021, updated guidance for nursing home and non-nursing home visitation in our state’s long-term care facilities. The pandemic has been a deadly combination with isolation at its core for some of the most vulnerable in our state. Sadly, it has been a year since many have been able to visit loved ones in person. As you may know, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) guidance on in-person nursing home visitation (QSO-20-39-NH) was newly updated on March 10, 2021, after you developed your visitation guidance.

In light of the new federal guidance, we urge you to update your long-term care visitation policy to ensure it complies and to ensure that nursing homes are not wrongly denying in-person visitation. Furthermore, we urge you to remove any requirements from long-term care facilities that require visitors to sign an attestation or a waiver of liability before they can visit a resident. These requirements may deny a resident’s right to visitation under the Nursing Home Reform Act (Sections 1819 and 1919 of the Social Security Act) and could be inconsistent with CMS guidance. Additionally, these waivers or attestations may put an unnecessary chill on the opportunities for seniors and people with disabilities who have been isolated for far too long.

We remain concerned that many nursing homes continue to deny compassionate care access to nursing home residents. Regardless of whether a nursing home is safe to open for in-person visitation, CMS guidance states that “Compassionate care visits…should be allowed at all times, regardless of a resident’s vaccination status, the county’s COVID-19 positivity rate, or an outbreak.” We urge you to update your guidance to ensure no nursing home is denying residents the right to compassionate care visits, to investigate denials of compassionate care visits and to vigorously enforce resident rights in this area. On a separate note, the March 9 guidance you issued referred to essential caregivers but did not clarify the state’s policy on caregiver distinctions, which leaves families without clarity.

While we appreciate your recent efforts to apply federal guidance to assisted living facilities, residents’ rights to visitation in these facilities and other non-nursing homes remain unclear based on the state’s March 9 guidance. We want to ensure residents of these facilities and their families have transparent and understandable policies for safe in-person visitation. One way to address this may be to apply the new CMS visitation guidance to assisted and continuum of care facilities to the extent possible and appropriate to ensure more consistency and certainty of visitation across all facility types. It should be explicit to facilities what policies they should follow on visitation. This would allow Oklahoma residents to more easily and clearly understand how they can visit their loved ones.

We appreciate your attention to the health, safety and well-being of long-term care facility residents and staff devastated by this pandemic, as well as the many families who are desperate to once again reconnect in person with their loved ones. These are challenging issues. We remain ready to work with you to protect residents and promote safe visitation between them and their loved ones. If you have any questions, please contact me or have your staff contact Chad Mullen, our Associate State Director of Advocacy.

Sincerely,

Sean W. Voskuhl, AARP Oklahoma State Director

cc: Commissioner of Health Lance Frye
cc: Secretary of State Brian Bingman
cc: Oklahoma Legislature