Each year the Kendal Annual Report, viewable in full here, reminds us of why Collington’s Kendal affiliation is so important to us.
This year some of the highlights for me are:
A review of some of the highlights of our leadership in whole ageing world, including, to quote for the Board Chair Message:
- Promoting restraint-free care through Kendal’s national Untie the Elderly® program and the Pennsylvania Restraint Reduction Initiative, which has helped virtually eliminate the use of physical restraints in Pennsylvania over the past 20 years.
- Helping to create the Continuing Care Accreditation Commission, now CARF-CCAC, to promote national standards of excellence.
- Providing a proving ground for the late Dr. Dennis McCullough’s “Slow Medicine” concept—a more humane and less costly approach to end-of-life care.
- Pioneering college/retirement communityrelationships with a passion for lifelong learning.
- Partnering with Hebrew SeniorLife (a Harvard Medical School A liate) to create and implement Vitalize 360, a scientically grounded health
and wellness assessment system that engages, challenges and inspires older adults to live full, healthy, vibrant lives and enables communities to better foster successful aging.
Similarly quoting, a listing of some of the newer such initiatives:
- Kendal at Home, which became a full- edged Kendal Affiliate in March, has begun to expand beyond northern Ohio to central and southern Ohio. In November, Kendal at Home introduced private duty home care—including companionship, light housekeeping and personal care—to its members.
- The new Tapestry program at Barclay Friends is based on the premise that superior dementia care enhances freedom and personal choice. The highly personalized memory support program encourages positive social interactions and fosters a better quality of life.
- A recent fundraising effort garnered $165,000 in seed money for the Kendal | People Development Initiative. This new program will help develop System-wide programs to support relevant training, certification, internship, fellowship and mentorship programs.
- In December, Kendal Charitable Funds awarded two Promising Innovations grants for 2015–2016: a $25,000 grant to the Michigan LGBT Aging Project; and a $20,000 grant to Saint Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, New Jersey, to fund a yearlong Caregiver Boot Camp program.
So many of these items,most of which are discussed in more detail in the full Report, have so much to say to us in our strategic planning process here at Collington. In particular, I am moved by this lovely news from the anti-restraint campaign.
Kendal Outreach, a subsidiary of Kendal, which administers and staffs the Pennsylvania Restraint Reduction Initiative (PARRI), announced June 7 at a news conference in Pennsylvania’s Capitol that the use of physical restraints in state nursing homes dropped to an all-time low in 2015—0.7 percent. Statistics compiled by the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) indicate Pennsylvania has seen a 97.6 percent drop in physical restraint use since PARRI’s inception in 1996.
My question to us all is this: Twenty years on, what are the national, state, and Collington issue or issues that emerged from the strategic planning process on which we want to be able to look back and say we have been 97.6% successful?
In the same spirit, it’s great (if a little bittersweet) to about our former CFO Amy Harrison, and how:
Amy is one of 22 staff from throughout the Kendal System who recently completed the Kendal Leadership Fellows Program. Modeled after the LeadingAge Academy Program, Kendal’s program consists of three, three-day fellowship retreats held in St. David’s, Pennyslvania, over the course of eight months. Fellows are encouraged to take risks, stretching outside their “comfort zones” to consider new perspectives or try out new behaviors.
How about including residents in the program, or setting up a parallel program for residents interested in such a 97.6% project? (Actually we could call the initiative “The 97% Project“, to remind ourselves how much difference the right project, at the right time, done by the right people, with the right persistence, can make.)