December 17, 2020

Johns Hopkins Launches New Courses on COVID-19 for Assisted Living and Senior Housing Communities to Address
COVID-19 Challenges

Developed with the Baltimore City Health Department, Courses Cover Emergency Preparedness, Infection Prevention, and Well-Being Policies to Keep Residents and Staff Safe

The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, with the Johns Hopkins schools of Nursing and Medicine and in partnership with the Baltimore City Health Department, is launching two free online educational courses for administrators, owners, and managers of assisted living and senior housing communities to help prepare for and respond to COVID-19. During the next phases of the pandemic, including the current surge and the impending vaccine rollout, assisted living and senior housing communities serving high-risk populations continue to be on the frontlines of COVID-19 emergency response.

The self-paced, web-based courses, made available on Coursera.org, are the latest in a series from the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Training Initiative and part of its COVID-19 Resources for Practitioners. This initiative, launched in May with a contact tracing course that has seen more than one million enrollments, offers expertise and practical guidance from the top-ranked school of public health in the United States and other experts to anticipate and meet pandemic-response needs where people live, learn, and work. The courses were developed with LeadingAge, a policy and advocacy organization for providers of aging services.

“Operators of assisted living and senior housing communities need coherent and consistent guidance on how to respond to COVID-19, a disease that poses a high risk to older people, given their age and health status. These operators face an unprecedented number of challenges trying to keep residents and staff safe while also trying to foster well-being,” said Morgan Jane Katz, MD, MHS, an assistant professor of medicine and infectious disease specialist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “The courses we designed provide a central platform for these administrators, owners, and managers to learn best practices for developing and implementing a comprehensive emergency response.”

"I want to thank the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and the Johns Hopkins schools of Nursing and Medicine for partnering with our Division of Aging and our Infection Control Team to create these courses," said Baltimore City Health Commissioner Letitia Dzirasa, MD. “Developing courses based on the lived experiences of subject-matter experts, including managers of congregant living settings, will go a long way in ensuring that our target audiences are receptive to our materials and will apply the lessons to their operations."

Both courses include expert lectures, guest interviews, links to additional reading and resources, and assignments. The courses focus on best practices and guidance for learners to acquire immediate takeaways to actively change their community's policies and implement lessons from the assignments to keep residents and staff safe. Both courses cover infection and outbreak prevention, staffing considerations, communicating with stakeholders, promoting resident and staff well-being, and leveraging health departments and other agency resources. The assisted living course also covers testing, contact tracing, and cohorting; the senior housing course focuses on housing operations, including critical tasks to protect residents in these settings. There are thousands of senior housing communities in the United States, many of which are small, under-resourced and/or lack robust emergency response policies.

“These courses provide a vehicle for administrators and operators to review current practices, design new policies, and implement changes to create safer and more supportive environments,” said Sarah L. Szanton, PhD, MSN, RN, a Johns Hopkins School of Nursing endowed professor for Health Equity and Social Justice and director of the Center for Innovative Care in Aging, based at the School of Nursing. “Our goal is to get the information to communities that need it most,” Szanton said, adding that the Senior Housing course focuses on federally assisted senior housing “since those communities often serve residents who are low-income and employ staff who are at highest risk.”

The Baltimore City Health Department has been actively involved with developing the courses, incorporating decades of experience in managing and supporting Baltimore's congregant living facilities into these trainings. The Health Department will play an integral role in promoting and creating awareness of the courses in Baltimore's assisted living and senior housing communities.

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to affect the United States and the world, practitioners need clear, consistent guidance and tools. From early in the COVID-19 pandemic, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, with the support of Bloomberg Philanthropies, has been providing practitioners from the national to the local levels and from health departments to school systems with the free online educational modules and tools they need to plan and execute evidence-based prevention strategies for the people they serve.

The two courses are available here:

Strategies for Assisted Living Communities during COVID-19

Strategies for Senior Housing Communities during COVID-19

For more information, visit the Courses and Modules Website that is part of the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Training Initiative.

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Media contacts: Carly Kempler at ckemple2@jhu.edu and Barbara Benham at bbenham1@jhu.edu.

For more information on the novel coronavirus and COVID-19, visit our COVID-19 Expert Insights site.