Care Partners’ Process Part 1, with Kelley Smith
In this two-part conversation, Kelley Smith at CarePartners Senior Living defines the various types of assisted living services and the CarePartners process.
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*The following is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.
The following podcast is provided by care partners living and answers for elders radio. And welcome back everyone. We are here with answers for elders radio, with our wonderful Kelly Smith, front care partners living and Kelly we spent the first half an hour talking about covid but I want to kind of switch gears now for the bottom half of our hour and I want to talk a little bit about care partners. And we talked. We ended last segment talking a little bit about you know when somebody picks up the phone. But I want to back up just a little bit and let’s reorient our listeners of care partners and how many communities you guys have and what you specialize in, which you do amazing things. So tell us a little bit about your, I guess, your footprint here in the state of Washington. We are from all the way up to Marysville, all the way down to lacy, Washington, and we have a community in spokane. We’re building a brand new one in spoken so we have fourteen communities to serve our seniors in Washington state. And then you specialize, obviously, in assisted living and independent living and memory care. Would you explain to our listeners a little bit about the difference between those three different I guess he doesn’t have the sins above here, because I’ll give you my brief elevators each share. We go. Okay, retirement is over fifty five, no services, no children over fifty five. They don’t really do anything for you. And that’s what retirement is. Independent is when you move into a community that also offers assisted living, you’re going to pay for that nurse, whether you’re using her or not. So you if retirement, you’re normally paying about anywhere from twelve to one thousand eight hundred buck bucks a month for your your apartment. Independent. No, you’re paying the same as an assistance living apartment. So you’re going to be paying anywhere between three and five thousand dollars a month for your row. And they’re nice, your apartments. Okay, they’re Nice, but they’re going to be the same as an assistance living apartment. So people need to know that. If you’re calling thinking you’re getting your retirement. No, assisted living independent are the same as far as the rooms go. It’s just that you’re dread a little bit differently. And Independent. Okay, what that means is the nurse isn’t checking on you daily. That’s really all that means. That means is there’s going to be a little bit of a difference. You don’t move your mom into an independent assistant living community because she needs nothing. There’s a reason she’s there. Okay, assisted living means. That’s basically what it means assisted living. You are still somewhat independent, probably, but you’re going to age in place and what that means is you can have all kinds of things going on the view. The nurse is going to be there with her care team keeping an eye on your mom all the time. Does she need help in the morning getting dressed? Are Her ATL’s activities of daily living? Is Somebody there to keep her safe throughout her day? And that means does she need help dressing, Tadh’s shower assistance, medication management, getting dressed at night, getting back and forth from the dining room, getting to activities? Does she need help toileting this she need help in the shower? What does she need with her activities of daily living to keep her safe in her apartment and outside of the apartment? That’s our job. Do we need to get her to her doctor’s appointments. Does she need help going to the store and getting her grocery little groceries? Were meal today or included in both of those? Okay, so that’s the now you go to memory care. These are the folks and memory cares not taken lightly. We don’t move people to memory care unless it is everything else has been exhausted. Okay, memory cares for the folks that have gotten to that point where that’s the safest environment for them. They’re usually exit seekers, lots of behaviors and begins look different from everybody. Okay, I have behaviors. I don’t belong in a memory care, but I have behaviors and it just is what it is. Right. So you take a look at what’s most appropriate for them to keep them safe, and a lot of time it’s wondering somebody who could be out in the street something that cannuse them to be weird or injure another human being. So with Memory Care Your looking at twenty four hour care, you’re looking at a higher staff ratio, you are looking at a lot more individualized care because, first of all, with memory care you’re not going to get them to play Bingo. You have to have more of the visualized type of activities and the activities are not going to be what people expect. They think they’re going to come into a room and see a lot of things happening. Not with memory care. And activity with your mom might be. We did her nails today and we got our hair brushed out and we got lots of lotion put all over her and that was one activity today. That was an activity because it is involved one on one with mom and got her calm. Sure you know right. Or maybe mom helped us up the table. That was an activity because in memory care people need to feel needed, they need to feel important, they need to feel validated, because those were feelings they lost during their process and their journey with dementia. So that has to be memory cares very different animal and it has to be treated as such. You cannot take a person from assisted living and put them in memory care and forget there’s a human side that has to be touched. So activity and memories that look very different. Families need to know that you walk into mom’s not playing cards for her best friend, that doesn’t mean she’s been ignored all day. That means that maybe she helped us up the table, maybe she’s helping US fuld sox. Maybe she’s helping us with some other things because mom needs to feel she’s part of the community. Is Well, because mom and contributing. She needs she needs to feel useful, she needs to feel like she’s part of something. And and Menha robs people of their dignity. Our job is to give them back their dignity and their respect and that’s part of what we do. So it’s a bigger picture of yes, keeping them dry, clean, warm, medications on time, keeping them fed with healthy foods and all that stuff. Everybody’s license to do that. That’s our job. But the end of her the day, they’re hold their feelings, their motivation, they’re there everything. You know, depression comes along with the with with with dementia as well. You suffer from depression with this. So there’s other aspects to do. That part you have to look at every day and I’m so blessed to work with the staff that I work with that, our nursing staff and executive directors, you understand that and really feed that with our residents. Walking in and seeing those residents smile at you because they’re having a good day warms your heart. Like you couldn’t even imagine right, right, and and you know, and certainly one of the things I think that is so admirable about care partners concept with memory care is your cottages concept where it doesn’t feel like you’re in this big building institution where eight for people with the men said it. Would you explain to our listeners a little bit about the cottage is concept. The cottages is our footprint. We’re very proud of it. It’s like a little village. It’s four and twenty five. I think our spoken community we bumped up to five little cottages. The majority of them are for and it’s a little village. So you live, maybe you live in the be cottage and it’s a beautiful day like it is right now, and the last night was horrible, but today in Puoh, if we’ve got a pretty day out here and it’s nice and you put on your little jacket, you want to go visit Betty over an a cottage, when you go visit Betty in a cottage and you got music. Today we’ve got Mike’s coming over to plays guitar out in the lobby, or not out lobby but out in the common area and the residents are going to. I’d listening. It’s pretty day. Where you want to go pick? You want to go pick flowers out in the garden today, you can do that. Maybe we’re going to have a couple of the staff members are going to come out. We’re going to work in the garden today, and you can do that. We’ve had summer days when we’ve had the water going in the residents out there and no shoes walking through the grass of the courtyard, where they can go outside and enjoy pretty days like today, when you have barbecues outside where they can smell the food and enjoy the beautiful, beautiful corn on the COB, that just sit and have beautiful days because we remember these are people. These are not our charges, we are not you know, these are people and our job is to make sure that these families know we love them and we’re going to take care of them just the way they would hope and pray that we would when they’re not around. So the concept is they have a little house and in the little house they have their room and there’s bathrooms and there’s a common area. You might walk into a cottage and there’s, my God, there’s those are buddy mikey. He’s on the couch asleep, because he would do that in his house. Yeah, you go over there and there’s the girls getting their knews done, and then you go around the corner and there’s a couple of our there’s Lucy, she’s making her making her loop, because that’s what she does that her day. When she gets saying Sious, she makes her loop. And then you go over in the corner and there’s our girls sitting over there with her baby dolls, talking to him and playing with them because in her mind they’re real, and that’s okay, because she’s happy and and this is I’m trying not to cry because this is what we do. This is what we do and and I don’t think people understand much how much these people mean to us. This was oncet. What people don’t understand about the cottage concept and why we keep building in this way is because it works. These people get a chance to feel like they have some independence and some autonomy. They don’t have somebody standing over their shoulder every five minutes of the day making them feel like they have no independence, and it works. And they also feel like they’re not locked into a building because they’ve got round, that they can walk around, they can feel like they have some open space, and I think that that’s one of the things that a lot of times in our memory care it’s in a wing at the established building that also includes assisted living, and when ends up happening is they’re kind of isolated in this own section and they don’t get to go anywhere, you know, and so this is really kind of a wonderful, unique concept that I am so, you know, impressed with about what you guys do. And you have some new buildings happening, don’t you, Kelly? I do. I’m so excited. I know people are probably looking at it’s like the crazy and then will a pandemic your building? Well, yes, plans for years, but here’s what we’re not going on a COVINGTON. Our brand new COVINGTON building is coming up so beautifully. To get a chance to check that out online. I’ve never been more prouding p all up as it’s been running. You’ve been licensed now for a couple of months. We’ve got beautiful people living here. I Love, love my residence. If you can’t tell, I think you probably know me by now. I’m that’s why I guess I do what I do. But COVINGTON, Oh mg, I’m so excited about COVINGTON. But check out the pictures. Will have a soft certificate of occupancy, probably February for the COMINGTON pottages, the walk coming to wish you could come and see it. You will not believe what we’ve done there. But that building is amazing. I’m moving and then the next one up from that will be spoken one, spoken cottages. They’re so over the moon and spoken. They need it over there so bad because they don’t have a place that does a true spend down. Nobody can take Medicaid like we can. As I mean, people run out of money and they have nowhere to go and and all of our buildings. If you want out of money, you stay. So that’s another need thing that we do. We also do the blunder pairs. So if you have a loved one that one one of them has to mention the other one doesn’t, but they want to stay together, they get to do that in our buildings to which is also we can go into that another time, but that’s another thing that we do. Is We don’t separate people just because one has a little bit further, further along than the other we don’t separate people, which is another because saves money, saves heartache. It’s another big deal and I’m very proud of that. But COVINGTON will be able to do that there as well. So we’ve already got a number. We’ve already got thirty people on the list at Covington. That’s awesome, telly. What is the website, and let’s talk a little bit about that in our next segment. What is your website so that people can check it out? Check it out www care partners livingcom. Will be right back and talk about a lot at the teachers that care partners provide right after this. The preceding podcast was provided by care partners living and answers for elders radio. To contact care partners living, go to care partners livingcom
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Originally published January 17, 2021