James Nov-Dec 2023 web - Flipbook - Page 46
or Spencer Windham,
providing compassionate healthcare in rural
Georgia is a family tradition. His grandparents,
Roy and Nelle Windham, opened
The Oaks, a nursing home in Macon County’s Marshallville in 1956.
Today, The Oaks is considered a premier destination in Middle Georgia
that offers a continuum of care from
independent living to skilled nursing.
Over time, Spencer, his brother Ashton and father Jule have
expanded the business to include
another Macon County location in
Ideal and recently they acquired
rural nursing homes in Waynesboro
and Plains. The latter, now called
Lillian Carter Health and Rehab, is
the building where President Carter
was born 99 years ago.
The purchase of the Waynesboro
and Plains locations saved them from
closing— a looming danger for many
rural facilities that will only worsen
if untenable Biden administration
mandates on skilled nursing homes
are allowed to take effect.
The new rule would require
specific nursing home staff to spend
a minimum number of hours with
each resident as well as have a 2446
JAMES
hour registered nurse (RN) on site.
The mandate would impose billions
in new costs on homes that already
operate on tight margins and does
not account for the multidisciplinary
care team that currently cares for
residents.
But as Windham points out, cost
isn’t the biggest issue: Even if the
federal government drastically increased Medicaid reimbursements,
Georgia simply doesn’t have enough
RNs to fulfill the requirement. The
one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t
match reality, Windham says.
“Most nursing homes already
have more than 24 hours of RN
care, but not consecutive around
the clock,” Windham says, adding
that the RNs are needed during the
day because 7a.m. to 5p.m. is when
most of the work with residents is
done because of patients’ preferenc-
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es in schedule and routine. He says
in many cases nurses with lesser
credentials than RNs are even better on the floor: “Sometimes experience trumps titles.”
Even before the new regulation
takes effect, Windham’s homes are
seeking to hire an additional 20 to 30
caregivers— a situation that mirrors
what nursing homes across the state
are facing.
“We would like to have even higher ratios of staff to residents than we
currently have, but unfortunately, the
people just aren’t there,” he says.
At the Georgia Health Care
Association, we commissioned a
study on the mandate’s impact on
Georgia specifically. It found that
the rule would cost $187 million
each year (that underfunded nursing homes don’t have) to hire more
than 3,652 additional caregivers (that
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