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John Knox Village is among six nursing homes honored by the state for enriching people's lives.
By STEPHEN NOHLGREN, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times, published July 24, 2002
The elderly woman snoozes in a chair in the nursing home hallway, her head dropping, her blouse moistened by a dollop of white liquid.
Jeannie Steinhorn, volunteer extraordinaire at Menorah Manor in St. Petersburg, zooms to her side. "Mary, you had ice cream, didn't you?" Steinhorn says, gently wiping the woman's blouse.
Slowly, Mary raises her head and focuses on Steinhorn. "Hey, Mary, I got my hair cut. Don't you like it?" croons Steinhorn, twirling like a model.
"Oh . . . yeah," the woman says, grinning.
Ice cream and hairdos rarely attract the notice of nursing home regulators. They typically focus on the formal stuff -- like staff ratios, care plans, inspections and paperwork.
But that will change today, if just for a moment. In a 2 p.m. ceremony at Menorah Manor, Lt. Gov. Frank Brogan will honor six Florida nursing homes with the state's first Gold Seal awards, essentially an A+
grade for giving care. Menorah, a Jewish-run home in St. Petersburg, is one of the six, as is John Knox Village Medical Center, a Catholic-run home in Tampa.
All six homes stretched beyond basic care to enrich their residents' lives, from an administrator who bakes fresh bread to computer pods where residents hook up to the Internet.
"Nursing homes are homes. People live there," says Molly McKinstry, who helps oversee nursing homes for the Agency for Health Care. "It's the little touches that make these places like home."
At John Knox Village, new residents and other visitors are sometimes greeted by the smell of fresh bread wafting through the hallways. Administrator Suresh Pai keeps a bread-making machine in his office and cranks it up frequently. Residents, staff and visitors all partake, as did the Gold Seal examining committee.
"Throughout the tour of the facility, there was pervasive odor of baking bread," wrote committee member Marti Deaemy. "The tour ended with handshakes and, of course, a fresh slice of baked bread."
The Gold Seal committee also was impressed by a Mother's Day project. Women residents were dressed in their finest clothes, with new hairdos and makeup. They were photographed holding roses. Then the photos were sent to their relatives in hand-made cards.
At Menorah, little touches often come at the hands of volunteers. Helping out at Menorah has long been an honored avocation within St. Petersburg's Jewish community. About 125 people a week don the maroon smock that distinguishes volunteers from staff and residents.
Volunteers operate the gift shop, call out bingo numbers, chaperone outings and teach baking classes.
Steinhorn, 82, has already logged more than 8,000 hours, the equivalent of working a full-time job for more than four years.
The Gold Seal program was passed by the Legislature three years ago as part of broad package of nursing home reforms. The idea was to let the best homes serve as models for others.
Years ago, the state rated some nursing homes as "superior" but handed out so many "superiors" that the rating proved meaningless.
To qualify for a Gold Seal, a home must have fewer deficiencies during inspections than 75 percent of Florida's 750 homes. Staff turnover must be low. The home must have kept the same ownership for three years. That rules out many for-profit homes because buyouts and mergers have been rampant recently in the for-profit sector.
Only 12 homes applied for the Gold Seal this time around. As more applications trickle in, McKinstry said, the state probably will hand out some more awards before the end of the year.
The six winners are all nonprofit homes, which tend to attract more private-paying residents, have more staff per patient and can afford frills.
In April, the federal government created a stir by releasing "quality indicators," statistics from billing records that compare nursing home performance on bed sores, pain management, restraints and other care issues.
John Knox Village scored poorly in pain management and treatment of bed sores, much to the consternation of staff and residents.
John Knox got skewered by its own aggressive attention to detail, Pai said. If a resident shows the slightest redness on skin, it gets marked down as a problem so it can be treated and tracked. But that redness then gets reported to the government, which boosts the home's incidence of bed sores. The same holds true with pain management, Pai said. The more aggressively you look for pain, the more you find it.
Larry Polivka, an expert on aging at the University of South Florida, agreed. "John Knox is a very good facility. I'm not surprised it got the Gold Seal," said Polivka. "What I was surprised about were the pain management numbers. I think those raise questions about the quality indicators, not about John Knox Village."