My Visit to the Carriage Club, Blog #3 LTC

The Long Term Care facility that I had the privilege to visit is The Carriage Club. I have been there several times in the past because my daughter dances there every year during the holiday season. I didn’t however, have the chance then to really investigate and look around in the facility at that time so I recently went back to be shown around.

The Carriage Club is not only a nursing home but also an assisted living facility. It is located in the Baymeadows area off of Southside Blvd. It is nestled under towering trees set back from the main road. I was impressed to see that it was a gated community, the gates closed at 10:00 pm and the only way into the facility after hours was by security code. The entrance way was beautiful, very clean and with a homey type of atmosphere. I immediately noticed a room that had bright yellow tape laid on the floor resembling that of a parking lot. I was informed by one of the residents that the area was for them to park their electric carts, too cute!

I was fortunate enough to be able to have a tour of the facility by the administrator himself. There were things there that seemed to be quite obvious, yet it still surprised me because I tend to take my ability to get about for granted. The residents had access to a mail room, hair stylist, mini mart, physical activity room, arts and crafts room, and even they had a small bar where the residents could go and socialize to get a drink. They seemed really impressed by that! Also just like a gym, they had classes every day for different types of exercises, for example, yoga or low impact aerobics. Oh, did I forget to mention the nice pool. Yes, they even like to get a little rest and relaxation out by the pool side.

The facility was split into two different parts the assisted living side and the nursing home side. The assisted living side resembled the apartment style living. Some were exactly like apartment and others were some what like dorm living. Both had access to all of the amenities that Carriage Club offered and both had beautiful carpet and décor throughout. The nursing home was a little different. It reminded me of a hospital. There was nothing elaborate, even the floors were different. It also appeared to surprisingly be much dirtier than the assisted living side. Go figure??? The nursing home side also had a completely different cafeteria, very small and run down. I did not like it. I was also surprised to hear that it also did not have an RN on staff, just LPN’s. That to was disappointing. Overall, the people were nice and the residents seemed to enjoy there place called home.

Wild Card Blog #3, Quality Management

Blog #3 Wild Card

Medicare's compare databases with a long-term care mission: because consumer perceptions of quality today may substantially affect tomorrow's healthcare revenues, hospitals should learn about and use Medicare's new long-term care databases
Healthcare Financial Management, Oct, 2004 by Paul L. Grimaldi

When doing research about quality, I ran across an interesting site that was very interesting to me. It was an article titled above that mentioned that now more than ever before people are not getting the quality they expected to receive when it came to placing there loved one in a long term care facility, aka nursing home. In the article it mentions hospitals that share a joint venture with long term care facilities “struggle” because the LTC facility did not even come close to what the expected revenue should be. The article also mentions that a second hospital is looked down upon because it has referred patients to a LTC facility that was of poor quality according to the patients, causing them to pull out and find other facilities. Also it states that negative comments were made from consumer advocates about sub-acute care facilities because of the poor quality.

Because of all these issues about poor quality and not being able to meet the needs of the patients care Medicare has come out with a program called “Medicare compare”. This is a site that enables the consumer or patient to be able to access online different types of LTC facilities and it lets them compare it to other nursing homes and facilities of specialized adult services. Medicare is hoping that this information will help educate the consumer in making the best choice to prevent future problems. This site is interesting because it provides basically anything you would want to know from type of ownership to number of beds all the way to what types of insurance it will accept. It also contains information on any place within the facility that is lacking, for example not meeting certain codes. If any one is thinking of putting a family member into a long term care facility, the best way to get the best quality is to be armed with knowledge about the facility.

Personally, I would highly recommend anyone to obtain as much knowledge on a facility before they place there loved family member in it. Make sure it has everything that you are looking for in a facility that will meet the patient’s individual needs.

The web site address is listed below; it is called Nursing Home Compare.
www.medicare.gov/NHCompare