To our Residents and Family Members:  COVID-19 Prevention Efforts Update – April 10, 2020

We are pleased to inform you that our enhanced infection prevention measures remain in place and our facility is a COVID-19 Free location – in both our resident and staff populations.

In addition, we continue to receive encouraging reports about the slowing of this disease in our country and around the world.  And, while that is happening, the Centers for Disease Control and the NY State Department of Health, continue to provide enhanced requirements to better protect and serve our residents and staff.

Recent changes include rearranging a portion of our nursing units to provide additional opportunities for isolation precautions.  Currently we do not anticipate the need to admit any active COVID-19 residents, but we will continue to admit new residents.  The recent isolation changes made enable our facility to separate new admissions from our general population while we monitor the new folks for 14 days.

On our Schuyler Hospital Campus, all of our staff have masks in place while in the presence of our residents/ patients and our personal protective equipment (PPE) supplies and sanitizer are available to staff as needed.  “Social Distancing” remains in place and virtually all routine staff meetings are being held via conference calls, as are the resident care conferences, etc., to further maintain physical distancing.

With today’s letter we have begun sending the Resident and Family Update Letters via email.  This allows the updates to arrive much more quickly.  We have been gathering a resident family email list and have a good portion of the emails collected.  If you have received this letter via the Postal Service please contact our office and we’ll add you to the email group if you like.  Also, we have begun providing near daily resident activity updates via Facebook at @schuyler.hospital, please follow us and stay up to date on all the nice things happening here.  You can also track us on Twitter at @SchuylerHosp.

We also continue to add more families to the video chat routine and it has been well received.  It’s pretty easy to use once you try it a time or two.  Please let our staff know if you would like to have a video call with your loved ones and we’ll assist in making that happen.

Our staff continue to provide great volumes of care, encouragement and participation with our residents.  We have added additional therapy monitoring to be sure everyone gets the exercise they need.  And, we continue to see volumes of special moments shared amongst the staff, residents, and families.  Our team is doing their best to help during this unprecedented time and they are making a wonderful difference.

Please continue to monitor our SCHUYLERHOSPITAL.ORG website, and the Seneca View page, for updates.  If you have any questions please feel free to contact our nursing units, our Director of Nursing, or me, at (607) 535-8611.  If at any time you need, you can reach our State Ombudsman, Trish Chevallard, at (607) 274-5492.

My Best Regards,

Patrick Ryan
Administrator