Friendship Village Senior Services’ March 28th Response to COVID-19
Who we are: Friendship Villages are two non-profit faith-based senior living communities rooted and grounded in the Christian faith that were established in the Chesterfield and Sunset Hills areas since the late 1970s.
Our Villages are comprised of every level of senior living. What does that mean?
While we do have nursing homes (what we call our Village Care Centers or skilled nursing facilities), our campuses are comprised of far more than just this, and also include tremendous offerings of Independent Living apartments and villas, and Assisted Living with integrated Memory Care. Our company also owns and operates our own certified Home Health agency in addition to offering private nursing services on demand, called FV at Home.
Our Independent Living residents generally still maintain very robust and active lives. Most still have cars. Some still have jobs and go to work every day. Many volunteer for charitable organizations around the St. Louis area. They are retired teachers, pastors, doctors, engineers, nurses, attorneys, businesspersons, artists, and much more.
Assisted Living residents reside in our State-licensed facilities and must pass official assessment criteria to be admitted. They don’t drive anymore, but they do still live active lives within their capabilities and desires. They are very well cared-for.
Within Assisted Living, we offer Memory Care for residents with dementia. We recently expanded our memory care capacity and are now becoming certified in the Montessori- method of memory care programming and we use new, high-tech tools and music to help exercise their minds, stimulate their memories and preserve their cognitive abilities for as long as possible.
Residents in our Village Care Centers (skilled nursing and rehabilitation or nursing home) require assistance around the clock. These are the most vulnerable members of our family. Even within our Village Care Centers, we offer a neighborhood with a higher level of care than for a typical nursing home resident for those who have needs with higher degrees of dementia or physical need.
How we are responding to the COVID-19 pandemic:
Every level of care has different vulnerabilities among the residents who live there.
Village Care Centers and Assisted Living and Memory Care
As soon as the threat of COVID-19 was known, we immediately moved to batten-down the hatches in our most-vulnerable Village Care Centers as well as Assisted Living residences beginning in the first week of March 2020. We immediately moved to restrict all non-essential visitors and staff from the Care Center and Assisted Living buildings. No friends, no family, no volunteers, no entertainers, no supply vendors coming in, and so on. To try to reduce isolation of our residents, we began offering the use of iPads to facilitate “visual-visits” with loved-ones. We rushed to install hand-sanitizing stations at every possible entrance to any building. Our staff in these facilities were immediately subjected to the recommendations of the CDC and the Department of Health for sanitation, verbal questionnaires regarding travel and exposure risk, and temperature-taking before reporting to duty. They have been instructed to call in if they feel any symptoms before they even leave home to come to work and we grant lenient waivers if in doubt after talking with our CDC-trained infection control specialist and employee health nurse. We are reasonably well-supplied with the items we need, which is a never-ending process.
As an extra measure, beyond the recommendations of the CDC and Departments of Health, our clinicians are taking resident temperatures every 12 hours in as an aggressive approach to detect any changes in condition sooner than visual observation would support. Plus, we are active participants and contributors in weekly discussions with all local hospital systems to make sure that our clinical protocols are tightly aligned and that our emergency treatment policies are in synch.
We also balance the need to continually monitor the well-being of each of these residents as they eat, as they hydrate, as they get out of bed and take care of other needs, to include the wide array of other health conditions they may have. We also take care to provide socialization that we feel is so important to their well-being and not complete isolation that can lead to depression and decline. Our teams in the Village Care Centers and Assisted Living and Memory Care are excellent at what they do, from food to housekeeping to laundry to nursing to entertainment.
Independent Living
As soon as the threat of COVID-19 became known, our team took immediate actions and have built on those as the situation has evolved.
We immediately moved to restrict access across the many points of entry to our residential buildings across the independent living areas of our Villages. Hand-sanitizing stations were installed at every door and many methods of communication were and continue to be used to inform residents of the threat of COVID-19 and the increasing spread of the coronavirus. Signs posted everywhere, letters and fliers in in-house mailboxes, announcements on our internal TV channel, videos from our CDC-trained infection control specialist, notices on bulletin boards and so on.
Our current posture includes:
- No visitors in the buildings (no friends or family).
- Only essential staff on-site when work from home can be accomplished.
- Supply vendors are highly scrutinized and cannot enter the premises unless all screening measures are accomplished to a satisfactory degree.
- Dining rooms are closed, and all meals are made available to be consumed in apartments or villas by placing room delivery orders or “grab and go”.
- All transportation off campus has been suspended unless for a bonafide doctor’s visit.
- Fitness class gatherings have been suspended.
- No group gatherings are scheduled or permitted and are highly discouraged.
- Every person entering any building must first scrub-in using hand sanitizer, then have their temperature taken, then answer a series of questions regarding travel and potential exposure risks. We have dedicated staff manning the one or two doors where access is permitted.
- “Video visits” with friends and family are facilitated by our on-site staff.
- Frequent communication on new developments regarding COVID-19 and our response are provided in video and in writing, on TV and in mailboxes, online and on bulletin boards.
- Social distancing is the order of the day and highly coached and reminded.
- Only essential employees who must be on-site come to work and everyone is instructed to call ahead before coming in to report any suspected symptoms.
- Upon arrival, every employee, including the CEO, goes through the entrance screening like everyone else.
- Our team continually works to develop innovative methods to enhance socialization through our internal TV capabilities such as in-unit exercise classes, virtual “joy-rides” and other fun ideas being developed such as an in-house neighborhood (sanitized) ice cream truck (cart) roaming the halls on occasion.
As the COVID-19 threat continues to increase and evolve, so does our response. Our team at Friendship Villages in St. Louis continually strives to meet or exceed all of the guidance and recommendations from the CDC and State and Local Health Departments in our effort to protect our residents.
We are prepared should an exposure or positive COVID-19 test were to surface with both quarantine and isolation plans.
Please pray with us that we don’t need it.
Your Friendship Village Team