The COVID-19 pandemic has not only affected the elderly population but it’s also targeted businesses that care for them.
In late October, Northern Star Assisted Living in Traverse City announced they would be closing their doors, affecting both residents and staff.
“When COVID came, everyone was scared,” said Northern Star Assisted Living Administrator Amber Phillips. “We stopped taking admissions for quite a while and that caused us to really kind of level out.”
And with no new residents, that meant no new business.
“We’re going, ‘Oh my gosh, how many times are we going to have to close and not take admissions?’,” said Phillips. “Just very scary, very uncertain.”
On top of that, Northern Star also had staffing issues.
“We started running into staff getting COVID, multiple staff being off at the same time, and then everywhere in town started paying more and more for staff,” said Phillips. “We just can’t sustain that.”
Phillips said other local factors also played into the facility’s decision to close.
“It’s such a difficult job to take care of people day to day and then go home and take care of your family,” she said. “A lot of my staff drive far to get to work here in Traverse City because it’s so expensive to live here.”
Phillips said it wasn’t an easy decision to make, especially when it came to finding new homes for her residents.
“When we came down to finding homes, and how challenging that was, and we weren’t expecting that, it’s really hard,” she said. “You can see people’s emotions coming into play, and my staff having to find new jobs, and the amount of stress they were going through, it was just all really bad timing.”
Phillips said finding places for her residents to live was tough.
“They’re not able to take more care on, they just need staff to take care of the residents that they do currently have,” she said.
Grand Traverse Pavilions is running into that exact issue–they can’t take on more residents in their assisted living facility until they get more staff.
“If we have more workers, we would be able to increase our census, or admissions, but because of the staffing levels, we need to make sure that we have safety,” said Grand Traverse Pavilions Chief Development and Community Engagement Officer Deborah Allen. “It’s paramount for our residents and for our staff.”
Allen says the staffing issue is something other assisted living facilities are seeing nationwide.
“The national shortage that we’re seeing now is nurses, the certified nurses aids, it’s the universal workers that assist in so many different levels, it’s really across the board in terms of the positions that are available,” she said.
After reaching out to Northern Star about open positions at Grand Traverse Pavilions, they have a new staff member from Northern Star starting soon, but Allen is expecting staffing shortages to be an ongoing issue.
“This is not a short term thing. People have been changing their career decisions, a lot of people are getting out of the healthcare industry right now because of COVID,” said Allen. “It’s undeniable that right now there’s a huge challenge.”
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