Nursing aides plagued by PTSD after ‘nightmare’ COVID conditions, with little help

Amy Maxmen | (TNS) KFF Health News

One evening in May, nursing assistant Debra Ragoonanan’s vision blurred during her shift at a state-run Massachusetts veterans home. As her head spun, she said, she called her husband. He picked her up and drove her to the emergency room, where she was diagnosed with a brain aneurysm.

It was the latest in a drumbeat of health issues that she traces to the first months of 2020, when dozens of veterans died at the Soldiers’ Home in Holyoke, in one of the country’s deadliest COVID-19 outbreaks at a long-term nursing facility. Ragoonanan has worked at the home for nearly 30 years. Now, she said, the sights, sounds, and smells there trigger her trauma. Among her ailments, she lists panic attacks, brain fog, and other symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition linked to aneurysms and strokes.

Scrutiny of the outbreak prompted the state to change the facility’s name to the Massachusetts Veterans Home at Holyoke, replace its leadership, sponsor a $480 million renovation of the premises, and agree to a $56 million settlement for veterans and families. But the front-line caregivers have received little relief as they grapple with the outbreak’s toll.

“I am retraumatized all the time,” Ragoonanan said, sitting on her back porch before her evening shift. “How am I supposed to move forward?”

COVID killed more than 3,600 U.S. health care workers in the first year of the pandemic. It left many more with physical and mental illnesses — and a gutting sense of abandonment.

What workers experienced has been detailed in state investigations, surveys of nurses, and published studies. These found that many health care workers weren’t given masks in 2020. Many got COVID and worked while sick. More than a dozen lawsuits filed on behalf of residents or workers at nursing facilities detail such experiences. And others allege that accommodations weren’t made for workers facing depression and PTSD triggered by their pandemic duties. Some of the lawsuits have been dismissed, and others are pending.

Health care workers and unions reported risky conditions to state and federal agencies. But the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration had fewer inspectors in 2020 to investigate complaints than at any point in a half-century. It investigated only about 1 in 5 COVID-related complaints that were filed officially, and just 4% of more than 16,000 informal reports made by phone or email.

Nursing assistants, health aides, and other lower-wage health care workers were particularly vulnerable during outbreaks, and many remain burdened now. About 80% of lower-wage workers who provide long-term care are women, and these workers are more likely to be immigrants, to be people of color, and to live in poverty than doctors or nurses.

Some of these factors increased a person’s COVID risk. They also help explain why these workers had limited power to avoid or protest hazardous conditions, said Eric Frumin, formerly the safety and health director for the Strategic Organizing Center, a coalition of labor unions.

He also cited decreasing membership in unions, which negotiate for higher wages and safer workplaces. One-third of the U.S. labor force was unionized in the 1950s, but the level has fallen to 10% in recent years.

Like essential workers in meatpacking plants and warehouses, nursing assistants were at risk because of their status, Frumin said: “The powerlessness of workers in this country condemns them to be treated as disposable.”

In interviews, essential workers in various industries told KFF Health News they felt duped by a system that asked them to risk their lives in the nation’s moment of need but that now offers little assistance for harm incurred in the line of duty.

“The state doesn’t care. The justice system doesn’t care. Nobody cares,” Ragoonanan said. “All of us have to go right back to work where this started, so that’s a double whammy.”

‘A war zone’

The plight of health care workers is a problem for the United States as the population ages and the threat of future pandemics looms. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called their burnout “an urgent public health issue” leading to diminished care for patients. That’s on top of a predicted shortage of more than 3.2 million lower-wage health care workers by 2026, according to the Mercer consulting firm.

The veterans home in Holyoke illustrates how labor conditions can jeopardize the health of employees. The facility is not unique, but its situation has been vividly described in a state investigative report and in a report from a joint oversight committee of the Massachusetts Legislature.

The Soldiers’ Home made headlines in March 2020 when The Boston Globe got a tip about refrigerator trucks packed with the bodies of dead veterans outside the facility. About 80 residents died within a few months.

The state investigation placed blame on the home’s leadership, starting with Superintendent Bennett Walsh. “Mr. Walsh and his team created close to an optimal environment for the spread of COVID-19,” the report said. He resigned under pressure at the end of 2020.

Investigators said that “at least 80 staff members” tested positive for COVID, citing “at least in part” the management’s “failure to provide and require the use of proper protective equipment,” even restricting the use of masks. They included a disciplinary letter sent to one nursing assistant who had donned a mask as he cared for a sick veteran overnight in March. “Your actions are disruptive, extremely inappropriate,” it said.

To avoid hiring more caretakers, the home’s leadership combined infected and uninfected veterans in the same unit, fueling the spread of the virus, the report found. It said veterans didn’t receive sufficient hydration or pain-relief drugs as they approached death, and it included testimonies from employees who described the situation as “total pandemonium,” “a nightmare,” and “a war zone.”

Because his wife was immunocompromised, Walsh didn’t enter the care units during this period, according to his lawyer’s statement in a deposition obtained by KFF Health News. “He never observed the merged unit,” it said.

In contrast, nursing assistants told KFF Health News that they worked overtime, even with COVID, because they were afraid of being fired if they stayed home. “I kept telling my supervisor, ‘I am very, very sick,’” said Sophia Darkowaa, a nursing assistant who said she now suffers from PTSD and symptoms of long COVID. “I had like four people die in my arms while I was sick.”

Nursing assistants recounted how overwhelmed and devasted they felt by the pace of death among veterans whom they had known for years — years of helping them dress, shave, and shower, and of listening to their memories of war.

“They were in pain. They were hollering. They were calling on God for help,” Ragoonanan said. “They were vomiting, their teeth showing. They’re pooping on themselves, pooping on your shoes.”

Nursing assistant Kwesi Ablordeppey said the veterans were like family to him. “One night I put five of them in body bags,” he said. “That will never leave my mind.”

Four years have passed, but he said he still has trouble sleeping and sometimes cries in his bedroom after work. “I wipe the tears away so that my kids don’t know.”

High demands, low autonomy

A third of health care workers reported symptoms of PTSD related to the pandemic, according to surveys between January 2020 and May 2022 covering 24,000 workers worldwide. The disorder predisposes people to dementia and Alzheimer’s. It can lead to substance use and self-harm.

Since COVID began, Laura van Dernoot Lipsky, director of the Trauma Stewardship Institute, has been inundated by emails from health care workers considering suicide. “More than I have ever received in my career,” she said. Their cries for help have not diminished, she said, because trauma often creeps up long after the acute emergency has quieted.

Another factor contributing to these workers’ trauma is “moral injury,” a term first applied to soldiers who experienced intense guilt after carrying out orders that betrayed their values. It became common among health care workers in the pandemic who weren’t given ample resources to provide care.

“Folks who don’t make as much money in health care deal with high job demands and low autonomy at work, both of which make their positions even more stressful,” said Rachel Hoopsick, a public health researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “They also have fewer resources to cope with that stress,” she added.

People in lower income brackets have less access to mental health treatment. And health care workers with less education and financial security are less able to take extended time off, to relocate for jobs elsewhere, or to shift careers to avoid retriggering their traumas.

Such memories can feel as intense as the original event. “If there’s not a change in circumstances, it can be really, really, really hard for the brain and nervous system to recalibrate,” van Dernoot Lipsky said. Rather than focusing on self-care alone, she pushes for policies to ensure adequate staffing at health facilities and accommodations for mental health issues.

In 2021, Massachusetts legislators acknowledged the plight of the Soldiers’ Home residents and staff in a joint committee report saying the events would “impact their well-being for many years.”

But only veterans have received compensation. “Their sacrifices for our freedom should never be forgotten or taken for granted,” the state’s veterans services director, Jon Santiago, said at an event announcing a memorial for veterans who died in the Soldiers’ Home outbreak. The state’s $56 million settlement followed a class-action lawsuit brought by about 80 veterans who were sickened by COVID and a roughly equal number of families of veterans who died.

The state’s attorney general also brought criminal charges against Walsh and the home’s former medical director, David Clinton, in connection with their handling of the crisis. The two averted a trial and possible jail time this March by changing their not-guilty pleas, instead acknowledging that the facts of the case were sufficient to warrant a guilty finding.