The other major issue we continue to confront are outbreaks or clusters of
cases at 278 different facilities across the state including four thousand and
eleven confirmed cases at one hundred and forty three different Maryland
nursing homes.
These outbreaks account for 19 percent of all the total positive
cases in our state but shockingly 46 percent of the deaths in Maryland are
patients from nursing homes .
We have augmented our Maryland strike teams with
three disaster medical assistance teams. These elite teams bring many years of
disaster relief experience.
We were invited by the state of Maryland through
the Federal Emergency Management Agency to come in and provide some expertise in
their fight against COVID-19 within nursing homes.
We're supporting the
Maryland Department of Health so what we've been focusing on here in Maryland
is taking care of the people who are at increased risk but are in small
communities where they can't move very easily.
These have been areas where some of the patients have been the most vulnerable
and we've seen some of the highest death rates. So what we bring to the table in
partnering with the National Guard, Emergency Medical Services, the
Department of Health is that we have a certain degree of expertise with COVID-19.
A lot of our personnel have already been in the field working with these
patients ,evacuating these patients, providing isolation techniques. And we've
had a lot of in-depth training that we've done in combination with the
experts at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
We're headed out to the
nursing facility to take a look at their staffing and their infection control
practices give them some resources to use so that they can continue to make
improvements and continue to provide safe care for the patients.
We just had a briefing for the facility and we're gonna go in gowned-up and
assess the situation.
Okay you wanna check.
We're here where the Maryland National Guard today and we're here helping the state of Maryland.
Today we're actually here to assess one of the small nursing homes in the state.
We're here to look at the usage of PPE and look at their isolation procedures and
to do a quick assessment on some of their patients.
We're here just to help them with the COVID-19 outbreak.
We're glad to be here.
We've been inside inspecting the facility, looking at their isolation procedures
for their COVID-positive patients and for the residents that are not COVID-positive patients.
Between us and the Maryland National Guard, we've done a complete assessment of the place and
offered a few suggestions for them and they've been very thankful for us to be able to
come and assess them and give them some ideas.
We're not used to having groups come in to help us.
It was very helpful to have a group that was coming in that
very much felt like it was to benefit us as opposed to critique us. They came with
a variety of backgrounds and shared with us insight from their experience in their own areas
of expertise and helped us to think through the different processes that
we're doing and what could be improved, what we were doing well and they were
very very helpful in a number of areas.