235 - COVID-19 and Senior Housing
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 19 January 2021
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
There are more than two million federally-subsidized apartments, units, and homes designated for senior housing. These communities, which tend to serve lower-income racial and ethnic minorities, have unique opportunities and challenges compared to assisted living and nursing care facilities and have been largely overlooked in the COVID-19 response. Juliana Bilowich, director of Housing Operations and Policy at Leading Age, and Shanna Dell, the lead infection control adviser on the outbreak team of the Baltimore City Health Department talk with Dr. Josh Sharfstein about these challenges and about a new, free course available on Coursera developed to help assisted living facilities to keep their residents safe. https://www.coursera.org/learn/strategies-senior-housing-covid19
KEYWORDS: geriatric health; health equity
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Season 3, a Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:12.3 | I'm Josh Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former secretary of Maryland's Health Department. |
| 0:19.6 | Our goal is to bring scientific evidence |
| 0:22.4 | and experience to the public health news of the day through informative interviews with scientists, |
| 0:27.8 | community leaders, policy experts, public health officials, clinicians, and more. If you have ideas |
| 0:34.4 | or questions for us to cover, please email us at public health question |
| 0:38.8 | at jhh.edu. |
| 0:40.5 | That's public health question at jh.hu.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:46.6 | Today, I speak with Juliana Billowich, Director of Housing Operations and Policy at Leading |
| 0:53.4 | Age, an association that includes many senior housing developments across the United States. |
| 0:59.4 | Also joining is Sean Adele, the lead infection control advisor on the outbreak team of the Baltimore City Health Department. |
| 1:06.4 | Our topic is COVID-19 in senior housing. |
| 1:09.6 | If this topic is of special interest to you, consider |
| 1:12.5 | taking a free new course now online at Coursera.org. This course was developed by experts |
| 1:18.1 | at Johns Hopkins and in Baltimore City with leading age, specifically to help senior housing |
| 1:23.8 | developments keep their residents safe. Let's listen. Thank you so much, Shana and Juliana, for joining me to talk about COVID-19 and senior housing. |
| 1:33.3 | And I'd like to start with the first question to you, Juliana. |
| 1:36.3 | For this conversation, what do we mean by senior housing? |
| 1:39.3 | Yeah, thanks, Josh. |
| 1:41.3 | Of course, older adults and those serving them, supporting them, have been hit really hard through this pandemic in various types of settings, housing, medical settings, etc. But when I talk about senior housing in this context, what I really mean is affordable senior housing. So that's what I focus on. That's federally subsidized |
| 2:03.1 | housing of various kinds that's designated to serve seniors. How many units or buildings around the |
| 2:10.0 | country fall into this category? Yeah, that's another great question. And it's, um, these are not |
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