6/21/21 Update: Lyngblomsten overjoyed to be welcoming more visitors and volunteers back to campus
June 21, 2021
What a difference a year makes! It’s been 16 months since Lyngblomsten first implemented campus-wide changes in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Thankfully, as more people have gotten vaccinated and the number of COVID cases in the state has decreased, we’ve been able to adjust several of our pandemic-related policies.
On June 7, we began welcoming more visitors inside the Lyngblomsten Care Center building, as it no longer was in an outbreak status*. Whenever the care center is not in an outbreak, residents are able to visit indoors with individuals who aren’t designated as Essential Caregivers**. (This is why we were able to offer Indoor Visits during most of the month of April, but then had to temporarily pause them on April 24 after we identified a new employee case.)
We made this change in accord with the latest guidance from the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH). As part of this, we still have in place several procedures designed to mitigate the potential spread of the virus, including screening visitors for symptoms of COVID-19 when they arrive, requiring visitors to wear facemasks when travelling inside our building, and limiting the number of visitors in our care center neighborhoods (i.e., groupings of 11 to 30 resident rooms) at a particular time.
An important item to note is that since September 2020, residents have been able to visit indoors with family members/friends who are designated as Essential Caregivers, and they’ve also been participating in visits with any family members/friends (including those who are not Essential Caregivers) held outdoors and inside our Newman-Benson Chapel. In addition, tenants from our two senior housing buildings—the Lyngblomsten Apartments and The Heritage at Lyngblomsten—have been participating in Indoor Visits since mid-January 2021, as neither building has had an active case of the virus since that time.
Another group of individuals we’ve begun welcoming back to campus is our volunteers. For the last two weeks, they’ve been cashiering at Anna’s café & gifts, transporting residents to on-campus appointments, delivering mail, going on outdoor walks with residents, and more. While we’re still getting used to seeing their bright yellow nametags in the hallways, it’s a change we’ll gladly take!
It’s true that life isn’t “back to normal” quite yet for our community, but we’re grateful to be where we are today. The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed how important human connection is, and so we’re overjoyed that our residents and tenants are able to connect in person with loved ones, special friends, and volunteers on a daily basis. With expectant hope, we’re looking forward to implementing more changes in the coming months (including for our community-based programs that serve more than 1,100 individuals off our campus in a typical year) as we seek to enhance the quality of life for all the older adults we serve.
*MDH, which provides regulatory oversight for the state’s senior care facilities, considers a facility to be in an “outbreak status” whenever it identifies one new case of the virus in a resident or employee. A facility is no longer in an outbreak after conducting two “point prevalence surveys” that reveal no new cases of the virus. (A “point prevalence survey” is when a facility tests all its residents and/or employees at the same time.)
**A role designed by MDH in response to the pandemic, an Essential Caregiver is a non-staff individual designated by a resident or tenant who fulfills a role in optimizing the resident’s/tenant’s physical, emotional, or psychosocial health. Essential Caregivers can visit residents whether or not a facility is in an outbreak status.
