Forest Hill gears up for a full calendar year

Forest Hill is gearing up for an extremely busy year as the Kanata home continues to work in the new Resident Assessment Instrument Minimum Data Set (RAI-MDS 2.0), prepares for accreditation in 2011 and focuses on safety as an ongoing priority. The compliance transformation project in effect throughout the province is expected to have a significant impact on the home as well.

“2010 is not going to be a light year,” says administrator Sarah Ferguson-McLaren.

While the OMNI Health Care-owned long-term care home has now fully implemented RAI-MDS, Ferguson-McLaren notes they are still very much “in the learning process.”

“We went off a documentation system that we’ve done for years into this brand new realm (RAI-MDS),” she says, noting the Forest Hill teams now know what to do, but it’s a matter of streamlining the process, which they are getting better at each month.

“This is truly an enormous project,” the administrator says.

One goal is to reach a point where the teams are documenting only the current quarter, rather than two quarters at once.

Capturing nursing rehab data accurately is proving to be a key activity to the whole process, Ferguson-McLaren adds.

In addition to RAI-MDS, Forest Hill, along with OMNI’s 16 other homes, is slated for accreditation by Accreditation Canada in 2011. This entails a significant amount of preparation in 2010 as the goal is to ensure that the messaging and service is consistent across all the homes.

“So that’s going to be a lot of work from an administrative perspective . . . because we want to make sure we’re educating our people with respect to the services that the organization provides,” says Ferguson-McLaren.

Safety will continue to be a key area of activity, as it has been in the past, and the compliance transformation project underway throughout the province is also expected to have an impact on the long-term care home.

Forest Hill has volunteered to be a test site for the project, which includes training compliance officers on the new scope of their roles.

Officers would visit the home for mock inspections and test the new compliance inspection process, the new complaints process and critical incidents inspections. If Forest Hill is approved as a test site, inspections will begin in March and run to the end of the year.

Reflecting on all that has to be done for the year makes her a little nervous, says the administrator with a laugh, but she adds she is also aware of the projected benefits of these various initiatives.

“In the end it’s all supposed to result in improved care, improved funding, improved processes,” says Ferguson-McLaren. “And so if we can embrace the change, which is often hard to do, in the end we should be looking at positive results.”

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