OHCA The Oregon Caregiver Spring Summer 2021

The Oregon Caregiver SPRING/SUMMER 2021 www.ohca.com 24 PROFILE Representative Andrea Salinas (D-Lake Oswego) POLICY MAKER House Representative Andrea Salinas (D-Lake Oswego) shares how her passion for healthcare has shaped her career and her policy work. What issues are most important to you in your legislative and advocacy work? I think health care is so foundational. It’s like having a roof over your head; you can’t function as a person if you don’t have health care, and for me it includes everything. It includes behavioral health, vision, and dental; it includes the whole person. I just don’t think you can disconnect people from all those various parts. Environmental issues are very important to me too and I loved working for the Oregon Environmental Council in the past. I love everything, quite honestly. I’m working right now on some big issues around farm worker overtime, universal legal representation for refugees and asylum seekers, and redistricting, which I never thought I would. You’re the chief sponsor of House Bill 2327, which aims to set the long term care sector up to be better prepared and have a plan for future emergencies, like pandemics or other natural disasters. Why do you think this bill is important for the future of the sector in the state? I just love it when any entity— industry or government—can be reflective, especially in the midst or coming out of a really big catastrophe like this pandemic. I feel like long term care is doing that and is trying to deconstruct some of the problems they faced and avoid them the next time. This is crucial to making things better for the staff, residents, and families. It wasn’t just the folks living in long term care, but also it was the families who didn’t know how to reach their loved ones and the business owners, who were all impacted because of this pandemic. I feel like, as an industry, you all are saying, “How can we look at this and make it better next time? How do we work with the partner agencies and how do we make sure that those who regulate us understand that we want to do the right thing?” That, for me, that is the right way to do things, so I’m super appreciative of that. I feel like amid this pandemic, everybody wanted to do the right thing, but when you have an emergency declaration and the ball is moving every couple of weeks and the rules are changing, it’s hard to adapt. What this bill is doing is putting processes in place for communication. We are asking, “What processes could we put in place and how did we miss them this time? How can we do it better?” What are some of the key issues that the COVID-19 subcommittee has taken up in the wake of the pandemic? For the most part, we’ve been really trying to thread the needle. We’re under these emergency orders and we need to know what has been given to us in terms of the emergency orders? What is coming at us through those orders and what do we do? As legislators, how do we oversee what the agencies are doing to comply and then try to take the feedback from our constituencies and be part of that feedback loop? I think that’s the biggest part of all of this. When we hear from our constituents and consumers who have family members in long term care, or when we hear from folks who, like my mother-in-law who testified about not being able to work out in gyms, or when we hear about kids who want to go back to school, the biggest benefit to that subcommittee is being able to convey our constituents’ voices and hearing from the Oregon Health Authority or different experts on how we’re imple- menting the executive orders and the guidance. I feel like the vaccine role has been the biggest and most impactful, but are we I think health care is so foundational. It’s like having a roof over your head; you can’t function as a person if you don’t have health care.