2020 Best of the Best
July 17, 2020
We are once again participating in a People’s Choice awards contest sponsored by the Observer-Reporter newspaper in Washington County – and we need your help to be nominated as the Best of the Best!
Please take a moment and visit www.O-Rbest.com and nominate Presbyterian SeniorCare Network in the categories of “Best Assisted Living Facility/Nursing Home,” “Best Place to Work,” and “Best Retirement Community.”
Voting begins TODAY -- July 16! Get YOUR NOMINATION in before the July 25th deadline.
Here’s how:
Visit the nomination site by clicking here (or copy and paste this link: http://o-rbest.com/contest#//). This link cannot be opened in Internet Explorer, you will need to use another browser such as Chrome or Microsoft Edge.
- Scroll down and click on “Health”
- Select “Assisted Living* Facility/Nursing Home” and type in “Presbyterian SeniorCare Network”
- Next, in the left hand column, select “People and Places”
- Select “Place to Work” and type in “Presbyterian SeniorCare Network”
- Finally, in the left hand column, select “Home Services”
- Select “Retirement Community” and type in “Presbyterian SeniorCare Network”
Note – if you nominated us last year, the account you created will work for your nominations this year. Simply type in your email address. If you did not nominate us last year, you will be asked to enter your email address and to create a password.
If there are any other categories you wish to nominate our organization in, please feel free! If Presbyterian SeniorCare Network makes it into the Top 5 nominated organizations in our categories, we’ll move on to the next round which is voting.
Thank you for nominating – your nomination helps us to build awareness for all of the great work that happens around our Network each day!
*Just like with our CARF accreditation in assisted living, this nomination applies to personal care; personal care communities are accepted as entries in the category.
- Select “Retirement Community” and type in “Presbyterian SeniorCare Network”
Great-Grandmother Makes it Home for Mother’s Day
May 8, 2020
Recovers from COVID-19 in Less Than a Month
By Presbyterian SeniorCare Network
“I could not breathe and had no energy,” recalls Carol about the excruciating painful symptoms she experienced at her Tarentum home on March 31st. “When I could no longer get out of my bed to go to the bathroom, that’s when I called out to my family that they needed to get me to a hospital quickly.”
Several days earlier Carol had been to an urgent care center complaining of flu-like symptoms, where she tested negative for the flu and was encouraged to go home, rest, drink lots of water, and take some over-the-counter medications. For the healthy, active great grandmother who was used to watching her five-year-old great granddaughter three days-a-week, the speed and severity of what followed was unbelievable.
“I remember my son saying he would call an ambulance, and the ambulance workers arriving already wearing their protective equipment and taking me to the Allegheny Health Network hospital in Natrona Heights. And then I don’t remember anything else, because I was in a coma for seven days,” she explains. “I think the ambulance workers and the people at the hospital suspected COVID-19 but I don’t remember anyone saying it,” added Carol.
Carol came to learn that indeed COVID-19 was the culprit and that her family would need to be quarantined for 14 days. Fortunately, none of them developed any symptoms, not even her ailing husband who is battling stage four kidney disease.
But on Friday, April 24th, Carol was exuberant. After leaving the hospital on April 16 and being admitted for rehabilitation services at the Presbyterian SeniorCare Network Willows skilled nursing center, she was excited about the prospect of going back to her home in Tarentum. “I’m grateful that the Willows would take someone who was recovering from COVID,” noted Carol. “I had the greatest therapists in the world to help me get back my strength and back to being myself. What I was most concerned about was the 15 steps I’d have to go up in my house. But I’m feeling pretty confident that I can do that after the steps they’ve had me doing at the Willows. I feel I can go home and be safe. They gave me exercises to do when I get home. I really feel I will be fine.”
When asked what she would want people to know about her experience, Carol was emphatic, “I experienced a lot that I never want to experience again. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone. If I have to wear a mask the rest of my life, I will.” She added, “It’s a very hard thing to do all that we are asked to do but pay attention, wear your mask, don’t be so anxious to go back to the way things were. We need to be very cautious.”
Carol left the Willows of Presbyterian SeniorCare Network on Sunday, April 26th happily wearing her mask.
Editor’s Note: Per the Presbyterian SeniorCare Network COVID-19 Admissions Guidelines, Carol was not COVID positive upon admission to the Willows on April 16th. Previously COVID-19 positive candidates must meet certain criteria to be accepted for admission into our skilled nursing centers and, as an added precaution, are kept isolated in their rooms for 14 consecutive days and cared by team members who are wearing appropriate PPE. Also keep in mind that Carol’s experience may be different than others who have tested positive for COVID-19.
Staying Mobile in the Hospital Helps to Get Better and Get Out
October 22, 2019
It’s counterintuitive to some, but activity is proven to make all the difference
By Edie Grossfield
Part of the Age-Friendly Health Care Special Report
(Editor’s note: This story is part of a series for The John A. Hartford Foundation.)
In her work as the chief nursing officer for Anne Arundel Medical Center in Annapolis, Md., Barbara Jacobs recently found herself dodging a lot of patients walking in the corridor as she made her way down the hall.
“There were so many people up and moving, and that was a good problem to have,” she recalls. Jacobs is pleased that the hospital’s initiative of the past two years to keep patients — especially older ones — mobile during their time there is working.
Because staying mobile helps maintain muscle function and overall healing, it also reduces the risk of falls.
Like many hospitals around the country, Anne Arundel is recognizing the important role mobility plays in healing, reducing the risk of medical complications and ensuring that older patients will be able to return home after they’re discharged, rather than having to go a nursing home or rehabilitation facility.
Immobility Leads to Problems
“One of the things that is absolute is when a person becomes immobile, the loss of muscle tone is very, very quick — the actual loss of muscle mass is quick,” Jacobs says. “So, when a person comes into the hospital and becomes immobile, it’s significant — even if you’re young, you will go out feeling weak.”
And weakening muscles is just one of the negatives of being in a hospital bed for days.
“When we lay in a bed, our lungs are laying back against the back of our body,” Jacobs explains. “For maximum performance of our lungs, you’re supposed to be standing or sitting, where gravity is helping open our lungs. So, we’re more prone to developing pneumonia (and other respiratory illnesses) because our lungs are not in the position that they should be if we leave you in bed all day long.”
Immobility during a hospital stay is connected to a number of other problems, including frailty, falls and even death, “even after controlling for illness severity and comorbidity,” according to a 2018 article in the journal Gerontology and Geriatric Medicine.
Hospitalized older adults who remain mostly in bed are 34 times more likely to die and six times more likely to end up in nursing homes after their hospital stays than those who move around at least twice per day, according to research that included nearly 500 people age 70 and older.
Mobility Priority at Anne Arundel
In 2017, Anne Arundel Medical Center began its new mobility practices in the hospital’s geriatrics unit, which is an Acute Care for the Elderly (ACE) unit. Anne Arundel’s ACE unit is part of the hospital’s “age-friendly” initiative, with the goal of aligning care to what matters most to each patient.
Patients of all ages, inside and outside the ACE unit, who are able to get out of bed and move are encouraged to do so — ideally at least three times per day.
“It depends on the patient, obviously,” Jacobs says. “There are times when the person is too sick to get up. But for most people, they should be getting up and mobilizing as far as they can every day.”
That means doing some walking, even if it’s only a short distance.
“If the farthest you can get is walking from your bed to the door, great,” Jacobs says. “If you only go from the bed to the door two times today, but the next day you go fifty feet, that’s great.”
To help get patients moving, Anne Arundel has people called “mobility quality technicians,” whose main job is to ensure that patients who are able to move do so daily.
Movement and Socialization With ACErcise
The ACE unit also launched “ACErcise,” a group exercise program that Jacobs says is popular with patients. The groups do chair exercises and walk to and from their hospital rooms. Other hospitals around the country with ACE units have similar programs.
“Part of what makes it great is the socialization of being together,” Jacobs says. “Then, we had some (patients) who said, ‘Can we just eat together?’ So, after ACErcise, we put up a table and they can eat together.”
This emphasis on mobility has been important to patient Cline Warren’s recovery, says his wife Martha Warren. The couple live in southern Anne Arundel County. Cline Warren, 91, who has dementia, was brought into the hospital after he accidentally ingested a caustic substance.
“He’s much better,” Martha Warren says, adding that along with the exercise, the socialization aspects have been especially helpful. “It certainly contributes to being less bored — you know, being in your room alone. And (it helps to) be able to focus on other patients or the activity director.”
Patients ‘MOVE’
At St. Mary Mercy Livonia, a hospital in the Detroit suburb of Livonia, hospitalized patients have been staying active through “Mobility Optimizes Virtually Everything,” or MOVE, since 2017.
“As I was researching this topic prior to implementation of MOVE, I found out that every day a person spends in the hospital bed can take up to four days to regain their strength,” said program manager Belinda Dokic, adding that the hospital implemented MOVE because “mobility can also be a medicine.”
As part of MOVE, each patient receives “personalized mobility goals,” which nurses and aides review daily with patients.
MOVE began in St. Mary Mercy’s observation unit. This included adding full-time ambulation aides who were trained by the hospital’s physical therapists on how to safely move patients to avoid falls and injuries. Toward the end of 2018, the hospital added MOVE to its medical/surgical unit.
The goal of MOVE is to walk patients twice per day. Patients who are unable to walk are encouraged and helped to at least move from their bed to a chair for some period of time during the day.
“Any movement is good.” Dokic says. “Even if the patient is laying in bed and we (adjust) the bed for them to sit up and eat (a meal) that way, or we move them from bed to chair or even help them walk from a chair to the shower — all of this is considered movement.”
Mobility Helps With Fall Prevention, Too
Because staying mobile helps maintain muscle function and overall healing, it also reduces the risk of falls. This is something Dokic has seen at St. Mary Mercy, where the patient falls rate in the two units with the MOVE program decreased from 2.7% to zero from the last quarter of 2017 to the first quarter of 2018.
For some, more movement brings concern of more risk of falls, but a study led by Johns Hopkins Hospital researchers in 2016 found that increasing patient mobility did not increase the number of patient falls with injuries.
St. Mary Mercy carefully trains its ambulation aides, Dokic says. “I think it was four hours of training, where they were shown how exactly to move the patients without putting them at risk to have a fall,” she says.
Patient and Family Buy-In
Nurses and other staff working on mobility programs occasionally encounter concerned family members who believe their parent or other loved one shouldn’t be moving around while in the hospital.
“The family member might say, ‘Well mom’s been sick. Just let her rest in bed,’” Jacobs says. “But we’re actually not helping mom if we just let her rest in bed the whole time. So we have to actually say to the families, ‘No, this is an important part of your mother’s healing, that we get up and ambulate with your mom.’”
Staff also encounter patients who would rather not get up, understandably, because they don’t feel well. In that case, Jacobs says, it’s important to remind patients and families that remaining immobile could lead to a longer hospital stay, or worse.
“There’s a question we ask everybody every day (in the ACE unit), and that’s ‘What is it that really matters to you?’ This is part of our age-friendly work,” Jacobs says. “And the majority of patients answer that they want to get home. Well, the best thing we can do to get you home is to keep you moving. So, if that’s your plan, let us help get you there.”
Edie is Next Avenue’s health and caregiving editor. In this role, she reports on the information people need to make sound decisions about caregiving, their health and the health of their loved ones. She has been a journalist for more than 20 years, reporting and editing for newspapers and magazines. Edie has a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Reach her by email at egrossfield@nextavenue.org.