Important headlines for January 22nd
Bottom Line: These are stories you don't want to miss and my hot takes on them...
Excerpt: Two months before a dozen residents died in sweltering heat at the Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills, the now-shuttered nursing home submitted a plan to county administrators to show the facility could handle crises like a missing resident or a hurricane. The 43-page emergency management plan had errors: typos and an outdated hurricane drill copied and pasted from the previous year.
The plan was approved by Broward County, anyway.
This week, amid pressure to improve the state’s hurricane response and prevent similar tragedies, a House committee released post-Irma recommendations, including new criteria for such emergency management plans. But the recommendations say little about how to increase oversight that might have flagged problems in the Hollywood facility’s plan.
“The enforcement is just not there,” said Brian Lee, a former state long-term care ombudsman who now directs a long-term care residents’ advocacy group. “The evaluation of the plans — the assessment of the plans — is pretty ambiguous.”
Hot Take: Despite what's mostly well intended - this kind of conversation is largely nonsense. Why? People who haven't faced legit adversity create 43 page like documents to address them (typos or no typos). Let's say for a moment a clear, thoughtful 43 page document - free of typos, had been approved by the grand poobah of ethics in nursing home care in addition to Broward. Would anything have been any different really? 43 page documents aren't read and comprehended during times of adversity. They just aren't. And all of the planning in the world won't make people do the right thing when adversity strikes which is still what this gets down to.
Having covered hurricanes since Hurricane Floyd in 1999, I can always tell when new higher level management who's never been in one is involved in the process...We end up with our own version of 43 page plans (while the rest of us work to do to what's needed to ensure we're ready for the storm). Emergency plans are like resumes. Anything over a page won't be read or understood and is probably counter-productive. You probably have encountered similar stuff in your line of work over the years. But, man to "plans" approved of by government make people feel good about doing something right? Let me ask you...How many plans do you need to know that if it's over 90 degrees and you're caring for vulnerable elderly people you've got an emergency on your hands and you should be doing something?
From day one in the Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills emergency to today, the fact still remains that there was a failure by the operator and almost certainly failures of human decency. The Florida regs prior to Irma stated that any operator needed to be able to maintain safe temperatures of 71 to 81 degrees at nursing home facilities that are checked regularly. If you don't have generators capable of power AC's for days at a time how the heck can you be compliant with that mandate? That's the first failure of the operator(s). Then for the people. If you're supposed to be ensuring a temperature that's 81 or lower and you don't - you've also failed. But here we are with more talk of more laws and more regs and more plans and more frankly nonsense. If the laws and regs had been adhered to it wouldn't have happened. Period. And until and unless operators and people do the right thing you can feel great about your new whatever but it can't compensate for people doing the right thing.
A Year of Real Change President Donald Trump, Washington Examiner
Hot Take:
The unemployment rate is the lowest in over 17 years
Minority unemployment is at a record low!
The average American just received the biggest raise in 11 years
The average American just received a tax cut of 4% or $1,980
The average American, once the tax cut hits paychecks, will have over 7% more income today compared to a year ago - the best increase in 32 years
Manufacturing has been a top three job producer for three consecutive months (first time in well over 20 years)
Economic growth over 3% for the first time in 12 years
You might say that's change you can believe in... Until tomorrow...