July 2009, Cover Stories
A Labor of Love
ElderSpan Management makes caring for the elderly a family affair
When Carol Griffin’s elderly mother’s health deteriorated in the early ‘90s, she needed more residential support than Carol could provide. As Carol, a registered nurse, and her husband Greg, a hospital administrator for more than two decades, embarked on a search for a suitable living situation for her, it planted a seed that quickly blossomed.
Soon Carol and Greg, who had recently sold a company providing turnaround management for hospitals, found themselves immersed in a three-year venture to build an assisted living facility that would provide an inviting home for Carol’s mother and other seniors needing residential care.
They formed ElderSpan Management LLC, a senior services corporation committed to providing quality living solutions to the elderly and disabled in south central Wisconsin, and quickly purchased a 3-acre site in Prairie du Sac, a town just shy of 3,600 residents, for their first building.
“People thought we were crazy for locating here,” Greg recalls. “But we looked at this community and felt there was a need for assisted living here.”
Construction began in 1994 and the facility opened in 1995, but not soon enough for Carol’s mom, who passed away just one day before the 24-unit building officially opened.
Their pursuit for suitable living for their own loved one blossomed into a family business that employs six family members. Today the Prairie du Sac site has expanded to include a 28-unit apartment building and a 14-unit memory care facility. ElderSpan also owns and operates similarly designed independent apartments, assisted living residences and memory care facilities in Spring Green, Dodgeville, Lancaster, Platteville and Baraboo. In total, their assisted living and memory care facilities provide housing for more than 310 residents and tenants. The management company, 65 percent of which is owned by Greg and Carol with the rest owned by son David and son-in-law Jon Natvig, also operates All Saints Assisted Living and All Saints Memory Care for Catholic Charities of Madison.
Small-town living
Though ElderSpan maintains no immediate plans to build again, it’s safe to say its next venture will also be located in small-town Wisconsin. “Most of these towns don’t have anything except a nursing home — some don’t even have that,” Carol points out. In fact, ElderSpan was the first to construct assisted living residences in every community, except Platteville and Baraboo.
Their philosophy is born out of a belief that society should provide living options for seniors in the communities in which they live. “Why should people have to leave their community to obtain supportive residential services as they age?” asks Greg, noting they were advised when forming the company to stick to large communities in order to achieve financial goals. However, he says the rural settings they’ve chosen offer more than money can buy in terms of community. Locating in rural areas also helps neighboring family members be directly involved in their loved ones’ care and builds a strong community among residents, who find themselves living with people they’ve known their entire lives.
Building a community
ElderSpan has replicated the design of its original facility five times. The design fashions efficient staffing and builds community through a concept that residential apartments are residents’ bedrooms but the building is their home. The building features two wings containing 12 studio apartments with its “heart” found in its common spaces – a dining room, living room and activity room.
This efficient concept enables each facility to offer a host of services. At the company’s independent living facilities residents reside in easy-to-maintain private apartments but have access to home-cooked meals, on-site management, housekeeping and maintenance services, and coordinated social activities. Assisted living residents have access to 24-hour care to help them with activities of daily living, including dressing, bathing, grooming and medical maintenance, transportation, housekeeping and laundry services. “The average resident needs help with three to four of those things,” David says. Meanwhile ElderSpan’s memory care facilities provide specialized care, services and activities for Alzheimer’s and dementia patients.
Setting the bar
Greg and Carol have always maintained a desire to raise the industry bar on quality. “The goal has never been to be the largest or most financially successful assisted living provider, but rather the highest quality provider in the state,” David says.
To that end, registered nurses and LPNs are a significant part of the management staff at every facility, which is fairly unique to the industry. “It’s extremely rare to even have nurses in the building, and it’s even rarer to have those nurses make up the management staff,” says David, who adds they’ve questioned this model many times and have always come back to it. “We’ve found it to be very successful primarily from a quality of care perspective, but in other ways as well.”
This unique management style allows ElderSpan to provide medical care not always available with assisted living. For example, the company offers hospice care for terminally ill residents, enabling them to live their final days in the place they’ve come to call home. Nurses also often accompany residents to the doctor to ensure they fully explain their health issues and understand the care their physicians recommend.
At the same time, employees use a nurse-call system to assist with other needs. For instance, if a resident falls and needs help getting up, a member of the staff comes to help within minutes. If someone cannot reach an item on a shelf, an employee aids them. Or if someone calls a staff member just because he or she feels lonely, an employee takes the time to sit and talk to them.
These things become possible by hiring the right people from the onset, says David. He says the No. 1 thing they look for is a positive attitude. While the staff by and large comes from a health care background, many come from unrelated fields. “They may have little experience, but they have a super attitude,” he explains. “We can teach someone the skills to be a good caregiver. We can teach them to do a good job as a housekeeper or cook. But we can’t teach them to have compassion and a positive attitude.”
A family affair
“We are a quality-driven operation,” says Greg, who admits he wonders sometimes if they could be such without their own family involvement. David joined the company in 1996; Jon in 1999. Jon’s wife Cindy holds a position as the company’s marketing coordinator and the couple’s oldest daughter, Sherri, works as the receptionist and administrative assistant in ElderSpan’s corporate office. Their youngest daughter, Beth, held the same position for five years prior to moving out of state with her family.
Over the years, family members have taken ownership in specific areas of the business, which now encompasses 320,000 square feet of real estate and 230 employees. Carol uses her nursing background to specialize in the clinical realm. Jon stepped into the facilities maintenance side of things, while David draws on his business degree to specialize in day-to-day operations and human relations.
“While once in awhile there is some grumping and grousing, in general the family is extremely focused on the business and on quality. We think about it all the time,” Greg says. “I don’t know if we could maintain this focus if the key people in the business were not part of the same family and moving in the same direction.”
The company’s commitment to family extends to employees, who are also treated as part of the ElderSpan family with a competitive wage, training opportunities and other benefits.
“There is not a week that goes by that one or all of us is not in one or more of our facilities,” David says. “The staff knows who we are because we purposely seek out interactions with them. We feel very strongly that our employees are the heart and soul of the organization.”
ElderSpan offers paid orientation and training to all staff, along with health and dental insurance, matching 401(K), paid time off and tuition reimbursement. They also go beyond state training requirements in providing Dementia Specialist Training to all care providers through the Alzheimer’s Association.
Seeking out problems
David is quick to point out ElderSpan is not perfect by any means but the difference is they choose to find and fix problems. “We seek out the fact that the carpet isn’t looking so hot, the paint is in poor repair, and we fix it,” he says. “We seek out staff who are not performing accordingly and we fix it.”
Their efforts have paid off. While other assisted living providers experience hardships from today’s economic woes, ElderSpan hasn’t noticed an appreciable impact. In fact, their facilities seldom have vacancies, either in residency or employees; and spots seem to fill as quickly as they open.
Greg says none of this would be possible without quality, particularly among the work staff. Quality employees, he says, are a company’s front line. Employees who strive for excellence and keep the wellbeing of residents as a top priority help ElderSpan maintain its reputation in the industry. “It isn’t us,” Greg explains. “All we can do is set the standard, then stand back and watch people grow and develop. We simply try to provide as much support as possible.”
Comments(1):
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Loved this article ...great values by this family.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009 Dale