NY nursing homes villainized, scapegoated in COVID-19 pandemic, former East End facility administrator says

A former nursing home administrator on the East End said he resigned from the position he held for 11 years and moved out of New York because he could no longer take the way the state is scapegoating nursing homes.

Vince Liaguno, the former administrator at the Hamptons Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing in Southampton resigned in December and moved to Michigan, where he is now the executive director at Autumn Woods Health Care Facility, a 293-bed skilled nursing facility in Warren, Michigan.

What the state did to nursing homes in the pandemic — and what it continues to do — drove him out, Liaguno said. And he predicts there will be an exodus of New York nursing home administrators, particularly those in the downstate region.

The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 was traumatizing, he said.

“I really did not understand the idea of PTSD until I went through this,” he said. “And not to put too fine a point on it but I think we’re going to be picking up health care workers off the floors for years to come, once this thing really settles down.”

“I would come home and I would — you know, especially when you’re the leader of the facility, you know, you have to maintain that stiff upper lip and you have to be the one saying, ‘we got this guys’ and inside you’re dying,” he said.

“I’d literally come home and I would just — I wouldn’t even make it through the door. I would just collapse crying. A grown adult man crying because I had lost two patients that day and three more staff just called and said, ‘I’m not coming back’ — good staff, staff you knew that it was probably hurting them to do it but they were just so terrified of this new thin. They felt like they could get killed. And you couldn’t blame them,” Liaguno said.

“The pandemic was bad enough,” he said. “But here we are, in the middle of a pandemic and you just got this increased — and I can’t put it in any other words — this increased… you could just feel the hatred, from every corner of society, from the families to the public at large to the government agencies to the governor’s office — this deflection back onto us — and it was just untenable,” Liaguno said.

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He describes what it was like for nursing homes when COVID tests were scarce or altogether unavailable, when PPE supplies hit rock bottom. And residents who have lived in the home for years— people the nursing home has taken care of for years — got sick and died.

“They’re like family. It’s not like someone who’s been under your care for a week. They live with you,” he said. The grief the staff had to cope with, even as they feared for their own lives and for their families at home, was almost unbearable.

But no one paid attention, he said.

Everyone’s focus was on hospitals, Liaguno said. Whether it was community residents doing parades and fundraisers, or businesses donating PPE, the focus was on hospitals. The state’s response to the pandemic was also focused on hospitals, he said.

“Nursing home staff would go home and be like, wait a minute, I’m doing this terribly dangerous job. I’m suffering the effects of PTSD from residents who died and families who say we murdered them and staff are saying ‘what do you mean I can only change my mask once a week?’

“You know, it’s like you were dealing with all that and then on top of it, you’re literally watching entire fire departments and police forces circling hospitals with these parades of cars, where hundreds of people were dying every day, hundreds of people… and the nursing homes were just painted as these dirty, filthy places of death,” Liaguno said.

Nursing homes are “an easy target,” he said. “The intangibility of this huge killer pandemic that we’ve never experienced before… there was no face to it,” he said.

“Everyone was searching for a villian, because there has to be a villain in the story,” Liaguno said.

“The nursing home as the villain gave people an outlet of where to focus their anger and frustration with death. You know right down to the fact that it’s the nursing homes not allowing visitation— No it’s not the nursing home. The nursing homes are the ones behind the scenes screaming to the governor’s office, please let these people have visitors. You’re killing them. It’s the government that saying it, not us. But we get blamed,” Liaguno said.

Now 52, Liaguno has worked in nursing home care his entire adult life. He started out as an aide at age 17 and worked his way up. He’s been an administrator for more than 20 years.

“It’s in my blood,” Liaguno said. “It’s what I love to do. I love caring for the elderly and the frail in our society. But it’s like, man, you just feel like you’re always behind the eight ball trying to get the support, the respect, the media coverage for the good things. It’s really frustrating,” he said.

He said he can’t imagine doing anything else. “I’ve always considered this my vocation. It’s not just a job.”

Working in Michigan, he said, is different.

“The reporting (requirements) aren’t anywhere near as crazy. They’re doing everything by the CMS rules. If the county infection rate is a certain rate, here’s the rules that apply. And it’s just automatic. So it’s not like you have to wait for a new memo to resume visitation or do something — you’re just going by the science,” he said.

“At least I feel like I can do my job again,” Liaguno said, “even though it meant I had to sell a home that I loved and move far away.”

Lagiuno said he wonders whether the New York nursing home industry will ever recover.

“I don’t know if it’s ever going to be the same because again I think they have driven so many of the best leaders, the directors of nursing and the administrators, out of the field. I think you’re going to see a huge decline in quality of care,” he said.