Crisis in long-term care in St. Mary's should be addressed

Friday, Nov. 20, 2009

The Oct. 28 article on the proposed new nursing home to be built in Callaway should serve as wake-up call. We have a crisis in long-term care in St. Mary's County that we, as a community, need to address before others whose focus is not necessarily in our best interests do it for us. One positive step in that direction is the creation of an active and transparent St. Mary's County Community Coalition for Quality Long-Term Care to address and find solutions for these troubling issues.

The long-term care issue of the day is our nursing homes. One of our current three is the Charlotte Hall Veterans Home where two nurse aides were recently charged with resident abuse. Another is St. Mary's Nursing Center, our only public nonprofit nursing home. This is a potentially excellent facility operating with approximately 145 residents in a building designed for 210. All research concludes that nonprofit nursing homes generally provide a much higher quality of life and quality of care than the for-profit homes, particularly those that are a part of a nursing home chain, yet we are allowing this one to deteriorate. Our third nursing home, Chesapeake Shores, is a for-profit home held together by dedicated staff. It has been seriously neglected by its out-of-state owners and management company and still has an extremely high tally of health deficiencies.

Now FutureCare is proposing to give us a fourth. Is it one of the exciting "culture change" homes with single rooms, central gathering places, short corridors that promote the easy movement between bedroom and community areas for those using wheelchairs and walkers, with a homelike atmosphere and resident centered care? Is it a step toward a future of better long-term care services for the county? No. What is being proposed is a building design that was obsolete in the 1990s. It features long corridors and prominent nurse's stations with personal spaces limited to half a room divided by a curtain. This is a building design that many nursing homes in Maryland and throughout the country are trying desperately to find ways to change without incurring large renovation expenses.

We, however, are getting this same undesirable design in a brand new building with no evident consideration of the many more suitable options available.

Not only that, we're thinking of building this nursing home even closer to a busy road with no berm to mitigate the traffic noise while experts elsewhere are trying to minimize noise levels. Then we're going to place it in a location that almost guarantees that any confused residents who manage to leave the building will find their way onto this busy road with no sidewalks or other safe walking areas. And, we are going to isolate this building in an area where those residents who are able to freely move about in the larger community with walkers, wheelchairs or powered wheelchairs will have no way to do so. And, no, not all, not even many residents move into nursing homes because they are nearing the end of their lives. We just built a beautiful new hospice house for that purpose.

St. Mary's County citizens who need this level of care deserve better than this. St. Mary's County deserves better than this.

A St. Mary's County Community Coalition for Quality Long-Term Care that brings people interested in quality long-term care together with people who have extensive knowledge of the advances being made in this area, and formed with the will to bring those advances to our county, is a good first step.

Kate Ricks, Avenue