Assisted Living COVID-19 Planning & Design Report

As our community plans to emerge from the current COVID-19 crisis, we have a rare opportunity to review current challenges in infection transmission and apply innovative thinking to design solutions that will help each other cope with future threats. We have to look to our most vulnerable populations and how infectious diseases has affected them physically, mentally, and socially to understand how to better design for them moving forward. This should result in safer more flexible facilities that allow for a variety of defense mechanisms depending on the acuity of the resident type. The time to strategize future forward solutions for our healthcare systems to best address these challenges is now.

Environments for the Aging stretches across a wide variety of acuity levels that range from independent living to long term care. Facilities such as Assisted Living, Memory Care, Nursing Care, Transitional Care, Post-Acute, and Rehab all have opportunities to benefit from a variety of design solutions. Each of these facility types faces their own challenges and must weigh the benefits of each level of defense for their individual facility against the cost of that individual investment.

The solutions explained in this document addresses the acuity level of Assisted Living residents. This document should serve as a tool to discuss options and even further solutions that can enhance the safety of the staff and residents during difficult times.