Understanding the Ephemeral Moment of COVID Avoidance Hotels: Lessons Learned from Acknowledging Housing as Central to Dignified Later Life

ABSTRACT

Place and health are intricately bound. COVID has amplified system burdens and health risks within the housing care continuum, in which older adults with chronic illnesses are disproportionately represented. The paper identifies the health experiences of older adults with severe conditions living in and moving through temporary avoidance hotels during the COVID-19 pandemic. An interpretive descriptive approach was taken with qualitative chart data and provider observation to represent the experiences of 14 older avoidance hotel residents living with serious illnesses. Through provider documentation, we illustrate trends pre-pandemic, in the first nine months of the pandemic, and the second nine months. Such trends include strengths and opportunities such as the health-affirming nature of avoidance hotels, their potential in generating continuity of care and permanent housing, and synergy between harm reduction approaches and palliative care. Challenges were also identified in catering to the diverse medical, behavioral, and psychosocial-spiritual needs of older and seriously ill residents and the consequences of geographic dispersion on health care, health behaviors, and informal care networks. Through these strengths and challenges, avoidance hotels present essential lessons in considering future housing and healthcare intervention and implementation that addresses the needs of older seriously ill people facing homelessness and housing precarity.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• homelessness
• transitional housing
• serious illness
• narrative analysis
• COVID avoidance hotels

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health [P30 AG015281], and the Michigan Center for Urban African American Aging Research