vallerydb

Hi. My name is Valerie and I am an administrator in north Louisiana. My educational background is social work and have always worked in healthcare. I have a special love for cognitively impaired residents, which explains my interests in activities. We are a 120 bed facility in a rural area. I have two activity directors. One focuses on the higher functioning residents and the other focuses on dementia and bedbound residents. My home is privately owned, which allows us to have a higher activity budget than some homes I know of. Our budget is $500.00 a month for both groups, but the costs usually are around $700.00 when all is said and done. I am a firm believer in educating my staff and all my clinical department heads, including activities, willingly (? ) go with me to area conferences several times a year. The only time area activity directors get together for support and sharing of ideas in my area is once a year while planning the senior olympics. Does anyone have any suggestions on how it is done in their area? Or if you live in north Louisiana and you gather more often, please let me know!

I would be interested in hearing from other facilities about their impression of the system and how their administrative staff responded to the posting. My home received an overall rating of three stars. Initially, I was disappointed in this, because naturally I wanted five! However, in my parish and the four surrounding us, there were no five star homes, two four star homes were SNF's in hospitals and out of approximately 40 homes, there were only 4 three star homes. So in comparison, I am ok with the three. I called all of my staff together to let them know our rating, and to give them the website for them to review any other homes they were interested in. I probably have about 40% of my new families say they researched us on the CMS site. I believe this rating will be extremely important to the state surveyors but I am not sure about families in my area. Please let me know your opinion of the new rating system.