Leaders of the union that represents front-line workers at Elisabeth Ludeman Developmental Center in Park Forest have for weeks been in talks with center administrators and state officials about improving safety standards and practices at the facility as it works to contain an outbreak of COVID-19.
As of Wednesday, 136 residents and staff members had tested positive for the novel coronavirus and three had died of COVID-19 complications.
While neither union leaders nor state officials would say they believed certain policies or practices contributed to the outbreak, both said enhancements were continually being made to keep workers and residents safe.
Anne Irving, who, as regional director of AFSCME Council 31 supervises the staff that directly service the Ludeman Center’s Local 2645, said local leadership had pushed the state-run facility on three specific issues of concern to its members and that the Illinois Department of Human Services had adopted statewide guidance on best practices as a result.
The primary concerns front-line workers have expressed are the need to suspend or reduce staff movement between homes, the need for adequate personal protective equipment and the need to expand COVID-19 testing for both residents and staff, she said.
Most workers at the sprawling state-run facility for adults with developmental disabilities are assigned to care for residents at one of 40 ranch-style group homes that house up to 10 residents. But some employees have historically been asked to “float” between homes, either to fill in when regular workers are absent or, in the case of new trainees, to get a feel for the job and interact with more of the center’s residents.
Staff members working on the front lines of the outbreak and the guardian of a longtime Ludeman resident said that practice has continued in spite of the possibility it may contribute to spreading the virus throughout the facility.
“The reason it’s spreading is very simple,” said a Ludeman Center staffer who requested anonymity for fear of retribution. “(Residents) are not the ones who are getting people sick. We’re the ones who are getting people sick.”
The employee, who works as a mental health technician providing personal hygiene care for residents inside of the facility’s group homes, said he didn’t understand why Ludeman had not immediately suspended its practice of moving caregivers between homes.
Allison Stark, director of developmental disabilities for the Illinois Department of Human Services, said the agency has attempted to minimize the movement of staff between group homes, but acknowledged that it was necessary to reassign workers on occasion.
She said the agency was no longer expressly assigning workers to provide care at multiple homes, as it had done prior to the pandemic, and that any continued movement between homes was necessitated by staffing shortages.
“The challenge is staff shortages due to people being ill and unable to come to work,” she said.
As a result of workers missing time due to illness or other reasons, Ludeman has hired new workers, reassigned other workers, called back retired workers and brought in nurses through the Illinois Emergency Management Agency to help plug the gaps, Stark said.
The Illinois National Guard also sent in 22 Air National Guardsmen this week to perform temperature checks and health screenings for employees at facility entrances to free up the staff who’d previously been assigned that task.
Stark said all Ludeman Center employees directed to work outside their normally assigned homes are being supplied personal protective equipment, regardless of whether residents at their new home have tested positive for COVID-19.
“We don’t necessarily want to have staff go into homes where people are sick where they don’t normally work,” she said. “But the reality is we need to keep residents safe and we need certain staffing levels to keep them safe.”
Irving said she’d been told the Ludeman Center’s practice of assigning “floating” workers had ceased in recent weeks and that workers were now only being moved when absolutely necessary. She said the union was extremely mindful of the issue and actively tracking it to ensure the facility complied with its recent guidance.
The guardian of a Ludeman Center resident who contracted COVID-19, but has since recovered, spoke highly of the medical care her brother received after spiking a temperature last month but also shared concerns about workers’ movement between homes and the shortage of protective equipment.
She said the workers she knows have had adequate personal protective equipment at times, but at other times went without gowns.
“They thought they had all the personal protective equipment they needed and then Week 2 into it, it was not (enough),” she said.
Illinois Department of Human Services secretary Grace Hou acknowledged the agency’s difficulty procuring personal protective equipment in a letter to stakeholders earlier this month.
Hou wrote that staff at the state’s 24/7 facilities did not have enough personal protective equipment to do their job and that she was fighting daily to obtain more resources to meet the “urgent demand.”
Stark, the state human services director, said personal protective equipment was no longer in short supply at the Ludeman Center, but acknowledged that equipment shortages have existed across the state and country since the early days of the pandemic.
She said that, in spite of earlier shortages at the Park Forest facility, all Ludeman Center staff who worked directly with symptomatic or COVID-19-positive residents were provided the appropriate protective equipment.
Workers who were not in daily contact with symptomatic residents were given the option of bringing their own protective equipment and provided guidelines to help them select the appropriate equipment, she said.
Another potential contributor to the COVID-19 outbreak that union officials have discussed with facility administrators has been limited testing for both residents and staff.
Early in the outbreak, when COVID-19 tests were harder to come by, the facility was forced to assume residents had the virus if they had come in contact with anyone who had tested positive because they were unable to actually test them, Stark said.
A couple weeks ago, however, the Ludeman Center received a few thousand testing swabs and began testing not only symptomatic residents, but also anyone who had come in contact with them, she said.
As of Wednesday, all Ludeman residents, even those who were asymptomatic and had no known exposure to the virus, have been tested, a human services spokeswoman said. The results are pending.
That level of testing has not yet been afforded to Ludeman staff, however.
Staff members receive daily health screenings and were recently given the option of being tested if they’ve shown symptoms or have been exposed to someone who has tested positive for COVID-19, but are still not being tested if they have had no known exposure, Irving said.
“We know we’re dealing with national shortages, but we need to give everyone the possibility of being tested, even in the absence of symptoms,” she said.
The guardian of the Ludeman Center resident who tested positive for COVID-19 said she appreciated that workers were being screened for symptoms prior to each shift, but worried that without actual COVID-19 testing for all staffers they may still be spreading the virus between homes as pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic carriers.
Despite the challenges workers have faced in combating the spread of COVID-19 at the facility, Irving, the union’s regional director, and John Haley, the vice president of the Parents and Friends of the Ludeman Center, a nonprofit associated with the facility, said they should be commended for continuing to come to work each day and put themselves in harm’s way.
“It’s inevitable that people will be frustrated,” when you’re dealing with personal protective equipment shortages, said Haley, who has a sister living at Ludeman. “But these workers have been amazing.”
He said the facility director and the Department of Human Services had been doing the best they could to keep residents and staffers safe and informed amid an unprecedented situation.
“If it were simple,” he said, “it wouldn’t be called a pandemic.”
zkoeske@tribpub.com
Twitter @ZakKoeske
