OST Nursing Home grows

WHITE CLAY— In January of 2020 the Oglala Sioux Tribe Nursing Home located in White Clay, Nebraska, will open a new 12-bed memory wing. This will bring the total bed capacity for the facility to about 70, and allow the Tribe to care for tribal members with memory issues, close to home.

For almost half a century, the Oglala Sioux Tribe (OST) struggled to get a tribal nursing facility, but failed in the face of a South Dakota moratorium on the number of facilities allowed. About 15 years ago, the foundational efforts to bring about the current OST began with current board president Kathy Janis, tribal attorney Mario Gonzalez and tribal financial officer Gary Russ. Richard Rangel and Associates designed a beautiful building, and the professional management organization run by Ron Ross, Native American Health Management, was hired to manage the facility.

The nursing home was constructed on tribal land just south of the Nebraska border, allowing the Tribe to get around the South Dakota moratorium and create a state-of-the-art facility working with the state of Nebraska.

Securing the funding to operate the facility became possible because of CPE’s, certified public expenditures. Under federal rules and regulations, health care provider organizations can participate in CPE programs. In a CPE, a state is able to certify unreimbursed Medicaid eligible costs expended by the public health care organization and draw down the applicable federal Medicaid matching funds associated with those costs. Ross was an expert when it came to CPE’s.

“It’s nice to have his company managing because they help us out a lot,” said Gonzalez.  “Ron Ross’s knowledge of the CPE payments (made a difference), being the former treasurer of the state of Nebraska.”

“I am so happy that this is moving forward,” Janis said. “We worked on it for a long time.

It’s gone way beyond what we started. With the help of elders, with the help of prayer, with the help of dedicated persons that were on the board, we are where we are now, and we are doing good.”

Janis is particularly happy about the help the state of Nebraska provided: “They bent over backwards to help us.”

Interim Facility Manager, Tiffany Shangreaux said, ““I have been in other nursing homes but this place is more like a home.”

“We’re excited for the Oglala Sioux Tribe,” Ross said. “Because we’re now going to be be able to meet some of the tribal member needs we weren’t able to meet in the past, in particular folks who have memory care issues, and there are some tribal members that we were not able to admit because we just couldn’t meet their needs in a normal nursing home.”

This prompted the memory wing expansion, and the facility designed to facilitate just such an addition.

“But now with this new wing that’s being built,” Ross said, “we’ll be able to meet those needs. We’re gonna have twelve private rooms, and they’ll have their own staff, they’ll have their own courtyard, and the furnishing and the environment there will assist people whether they have Alzheimer’s or some other form of dementia. This is just a service that the nursing home’s gonna be able to provide. Were looking forward to it and we should have it up and going here in a few months.”

The specifics of the memory wing took careful consideration, and much thought went into details to guarantee the safety of the residents.

“Probably one of the biggest difference is it’s a locked unit,” Ross said. “You need to have a locked unit because whether it’s really hot outside, and they could get out and get dehydrated, or whether its winter and its freezing outside, and so a locked unit is very important for a memory care because a lot of times these folks just don’t have the functionality to know the weather, know what’s good for them, it’s just a part of the disease process.”

To provide quality care for memory wing residents, staff will have to be trained specifically for that purpose. Ross: “We do special training so (employees) can act and react to help the residents.”

The appearance, structure and furnishing of the wing must also take the memory issues of residents into account. Ross explains some of those alterations: “The colors are more muted, not so vibrant, because sometimes bold colors can set people off, and then the furnishings are probably just a little bit more solid so that they don’t push them over or something, and then the other thing that we do is, we put memory boxes around. We try to find things that remind them of their childhood so that they can have good memories. A lot of times, those people that have memory care problems, it’s more the newer memories that they are having problems with, and yet they can tell you what happened to them when they were ten years old, so we’re just trying to bring back some of the good memories.”

In designing the wing, it had to be large enough to accomplish care objectives, but small enough so the residents won’t feel alarmed. Ross: “One of the things about a memory care unit, is you want to have it small so it’s not so disruptive and people get noisy.”

Managing nursing homes across the country, Ross has a comprehensive perspective where the OST Nursing Home fits into the quality care spectrum: “The facility has met everybody’s expectations. One of the things that even expanded on that, is the employment opportunities that we have for many tribal members, so we not only take care of their grandparents, but we’re in a position to take care of the grandkids by offering them good salaries and good benefits, and the residents can be taken care of by their own families, and so that has been a really good thing. More and more of the tribal members become CNAs (certified nursing assistants). Almost any position in the facility, these folks can be trained to do, and then if they wanna go off and become an LPN or an RN, we have employment opportunities for them, too. So, it’s just been a great deal for the residents as well as the workforce. There’s only about 18 tribal nursing homes across the United States, at our last count, and we are probably the newest facility and when you take a look at our facility compared to others, this facility does a great job taking care of residents, the environments the residents live in, how close it is to the workforce, it’s definitely in the top five units.”

Eventually most of us will have an elderly loved one requiring care, and Ross detailed the process whereby the community can utilize the services of the OST Nursing Home: “I would like to invite people, when it comes time that they know that one of their loved ones is either in the need of nursing homes or memory care, that they stop by and visit with the administrator, and tell them about the situation. Because there are people on staff at the facility, social services, admissions coordinators, the director of nurses, the administrator, and they can all help folks learn how to access programs. (If) they can’t afford it on their own, there’s ways we can help them access the funds to live there.”

Nowhere in South Dakota is there a facility with better aesthetics, management, staffing or accessibility than the OST Nursing Home.

“We criticize each other, and some other tribes look down on us for various reasons,” Gonzalez said, “but we have a lot to be proud of. What other tribe has a facility like this?”

(James Giago Davies is an enrolled member of the Oglala Lakota tribe. He can be reached at skindiesel@msn.com)

 

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