Bei Wu, consulting associate, and Roy Thompson, PhD student, co-authored an editorial, "What COVID-19 Innovations Can Teach Us About Improving Quality of Life in Long-Term Care," in JAMDA. 

Introduction

The impact of COVID-19 on long-term care (LTC) staff and residents has been widely documented. In many countries with available data, the percentage of deaths among nursing home residents ranged from 34% to 80% of COVID-19–related mortality. Globally, staff, administrators, and community members have devised innovative strategies to maintain quality of life for residents while reducing spread of COVID-19. Although developed as urgent responses to a temporary situation, some innovations could address longstanding quality of life challenges and should, we suggest, be considered for permanent adoption. Our purpose is to highlight some of those innovations.

Our team conducted a literature review of topics related to innovation and nursing home quality of life in the context of COVID-19. The Google Scholar search engine was used for much of the search. Recognizing that much of the literature would not be published in academic journals, we also used other search engines to search for relevant sources from newspaper articles and government reports. As a global team, in addition to the English-language sources, we searched for sources in several other languages, including Chinese, Japanese, and Spanish. Through this search, we identified 19 interventions related to improving resident quality of life; Interventions were grouped into 4 categories based on their stated or implied purpose, namely, to increase resident social connections, improve physical fitness, support staff/resident relationships, and promote staff/family communication.