This site is best viewed using Mozilla Firefox browser.

Senior Living

2011-01-01 10:18:00

Not your Grandmother’s nursing home

Question: I’ve heard you mention several times “It’s not your Grandmother’s Nursing Home” What do you mean by that?

Answer: Nursing home’s, during their inception, back in Grandma’s time were basically modeled after acute care hospitals. In that kind of environment, everyone must be told what to do and unquestioningly do it, since the emergency nature of the hospital is to save lives which are immediately at risk. In that scenario, quality of life stepped aside for the saving of life. Unfortunately, as they evolved in the early days, they tended to become warehouses for those waiting to die. It wasn’t a pretty picture, and most of our current regulations were developed to protect persons who lived in that kind of environment. Today’s nursing home is anything but a warehouse for the elderly. Home is the operative word and the culture is constantly changing to make nursing homes more responsive to the wants and needs of the residents, rather than just dealing with their clinical needs. In other words, we want to make it home, not an institution. Many persons, who come to a nursing home today, come for short-term nursing and rehabilitation therapies. It is often a halfway house between the acute hospital stay and returning to a normal life at home. Skilled nursing homes today offer Physical, Occupational and Speech therapies to their residents. In many cases, they are offered to get the resident in shape to go home and live their own life. In other instances, they are given to get the resident in the best shape they can be to live as normally as possible. Most all of us want to be able to do things for ourselves. We Americans are an independent lot. We don’t want someone choosing our clothes and taking care of our normal activities. We want to brush our own teeth, comb our own hair and put on our own clothes. However, often people coming into the nursing home, for whatever reason are unable to accomplish all that for them. Therapies are designed to give us back as much of our independence as possible. It is not all that unusual for someone coming into a nursing home to find that with the excellent care they receive, many of their abilities are restored and they are able to go to a less restrictive environment, whether that is to independent or assisted living. Nursing homes are more homes than nursing now. Of course, the nurses and care staff are still there to provide for your medical/clinical needs, but the focus is on quality of life now, not just what medicines the doctor ordered. That’s the way it should be. It wasn’t all that long ago that I sat in my living room talking with a friend about the treatment my father was receiving in a nursing home in another town. We were appalled. We considered whether we should join an advocacy group, try to get together a group of our own, or what we could do to change the situation. After a lot of prayer, we decided that the only way to make a real change was to get in and do the work ourselves. As my friend said, “You’re just not a toe-in-the-water kind of guy.” I decided to bite the bullet and began my training as nursing home administrator. Nursing Homes are in a constant state of change, and I should say, thankfully in a state of change. I didn’t like what Dad had to go through. I love the way we take care of residents now. I also love the way we are changing the way we take care of them. When we began a program of “Whole Person Care” back in 2003, we were among the leaders in the field of change that would later be labeled “Culture Change” Today, I was in meetings dealing with restaurant style menus,, open meal times, so residents can eat whenever they want, not just at scheduled times,, resident choices for when they get up and go to bed, We were forming committees so the caregivers who know what the residents want most, could tell us what changes we need to make for them. When I began as a nursing home administrator, we didn’t allow pets into the building because animals were “unsanitary”. Today we have our own dog roaming the halls and giving love to the residents. The Social Services person and I were discussing the other day, what we would have to do to be able to safely take residents to the casino. We think they’d like that even more than the two slot machines (tokens only!) that we already have in the facility, courtesy of one of our staff members. We’re also planning picnics and fishing trips to the lake, even though we now in the winter months I was talking with an amazing friend the other day. She is 87-years-old and each Thursday evening she has a dance at her local American Legion Hall. She doesn’t dance as much as she used to, but she still won’t miss a fast polka. When someone laughingly suggested that she should be picking out a nursing home her answer was “They’re not going to tie me in a wheelchair, drug me up and put me in a corner...” That’s the nursing home of our grandmothers. Many of our elderly, just like my friend, fear it. But it’s not the nursing home of your grandmother anymore. It’s a real home , where people go to live and if possible, get well enough to return to their other home. And if they can’t go back, then this is where they have friends and fun. A few years ago, I had a resident come to me and say, “If I’d known it was this much fun here, I’d have moved in years ago.”