During the outbreak, the availability of health workers and other medical resources like masks, sanitizers was of critical importance. The objective of this analysis is to convey the resource limitations faced by the nursing homes in various states across the U.S. The analysis is divided into 2 parts.
Shortage of Staff
In first part, the shortage of all the medical staff which were categorized into 4 types, namely, Nursing staff (registered and licensed nurses), Clinical staff(physicians), Aides (assistant nurses) and other staff(facilities personnel) was analyzed at a State Level.
Availability of Resources
In second part, the availability of resources like eye protection, gloves, hand sanitizers, N95 masks, and surgical masks was analyzed at a State Level.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services obtained the data for all the states of the USA. The data is collected at the end of every week starting May 29th, 2020 to March 20th, 2022. The data spans over 15,097 different nursing homes across the country. For resources like eye protection, gloves, hand sanitizers, N95 masks, surgical masks the data is available since April 2021 .
The following map indicates the percentage of nursing home facing shortage of various kinds of staff in each state for every month. The month-year and staff type can be selected from the dropdown menu on the right. States like California, Texas, Massachusetts seem to have enough staff when compared to other states like Georgia and Minnesota.
This plot captures the variation in shortage of various staff over the period of time from May 2020 to Feb 2022. Any number of states and type of staff can be selected from the drop down menu to compare the shortage.
One crucial pattern which was observed for all the states is, nursing homes faced a large shortage of Aides than the shortage of rest of the kind of staff namely, Clinical staff, Nursing Staff, Other Staff. Again percentage is calculated based on count of nursing homes facing shortage in each state in proportion to total number of nursing homes in that particular state. Required time frame and state to be observed can be selected from the filters below.
The following graph depicts the shortage of aides, i.e., helpers for medications, certified nurse assistants, etc. Ohio faced one of the most severe shortage for this category.
This was particularly a very difficult time for doctors, physicians and experienced assistants, which is evident from the below visualization. As deduced from the geomap, North-Eastern states faced a more severe shortage of clinical staff.
Nursing staff include Registered nurses, Licensed Practitioner nurses and vocational trainees. With a high number of incoming patients and cases, there was a shortage of nursing staff across the country as depicted in the below graph.
The graph given below gives an understanding on the shortage faced on the requirement of other staff; which includes facilities personnel, cleaning staff, etc. The states on the North-East US faced a comparatively higher shortage than those on the western coast.
To get a comparison of the shortages faced across the states throughout the country, the geomap given below can be used. The data can be filtered for any specific time period, for a single or multiple states. The percentage varies from a 1.33 to as high as over 27% for certain states; over the entire period. However, filtering the weeks can give different results. As an example, from the overall data, it is evident that the states in the north-eastern regions faced more aggregate shortage than those on the south-west.
This map again indicates the percentage of nursing homes having availability of Eye Protection, Gloves, N95 masks, Surgical Masks. The resources an be selected from the filter to observe individual resource and it's availability in states. Although, there is no remarkable variation in the availability of these items in most of the U.S states, it is evident enough that California, which had the least shortage of staff, surprisingly has the lowest availability for all these 4 items when compared to other states.
Eye Protection, Gloves, N95 masks, Surgical Masks have been available in most of the nursing homes through out the time period of April 2020 to March 2022. For each state, the pattern of availability of these items can be observed below.