Exciting Changes … For our entire facility!
This is an exciting time!  New models of living and providing health and human services are being explored and implemented.  Led by human compassion and economic foresight, facilities such as Hillsboro Medical Center are taking a common sense approach to living and caring for elders to create long-term care communities where elders choose to live their lives, with staff who enjoy assisting them.  This same philosophy guides our hospital care for our patients.

We are working with the Action Pact organization to implement our renewed philosophy of care for our residents and patients.  Action Pact, through a program called Culture Change, focuses on changes for nursing homes but we will take that approach and incorporate it into our care plan for assisted living and the hospital as well as the nursing home.  

Action Pact teaches that nursing homes need to be staffed by familiar caregivers who help their community’s residents live lives of meaning, value and joy.  Residents have their private spaces as well as family gathering places and an opportunity to live life with a measure of independence and responsibility.  The goal is to insure these communities provide the best personal, health and medical services anyone will need, including those with serious medical or health issues. 

Such a plan involves not just a change in the physical space but in the manner in which staff provides care.  Staff consistently interact with each resident so the resident can establish long-term relationships with their caregivers.  Staff and residents together prepare and eat meals, visit or participate in activities.  Days are informal, as would happen in one’s own home, resulting in a truly rewarding and satisfying daily life for elders – and for staff.  Residents sleep, eat and participate in activities of their choosing on their own schedules rather than one that has been set for them.  

To the extent that we can, given a patient’s need for specific medical services, we will also incorporate this culture in our hospital.  Our vision is for a complete consistency and continuum of care, whether we are with our patients in the hospital or our residents in the nursing home or assisted living. 

Our caregivers and medical staff have always provided the best in care to our residents and our patients. 
Now that excellent care will be enhanced with a new approach to living and providing health care!