There aren't many vertical Green House model senior living communities out there, but Saturday of the Environments for Aging (EFA) Conference treated some attendees to a tour of the four-story Green House Residences at Stadium Place in Baltimore.
The skilled nursing community has 12-bed units to house a total of 49 residents (with some rooms large enough to accommodate two residents, if desired). With the site opening three years ago, community leader/guide Susan L. Stone has been at the helm for about 1.5 years and during the tour she shared plenty of lessons learned along the way.
Each floor is identical and anchored by a large open kitchen and adjoining dining area where residents share meals prepared by staff. All rooms are private and have private bathrooms, as well. The individual floors also include a screened front porch and larger back porch overlooking nearby ball fields. The campus itself is home to other community services such as a YMCA and daycare as well as a community of independent living that's also part of Stadium Place.
As for the household design, Stone said that part of creating a space that feels homelike is to ensure there's no swarm of staff overwhelming the residents. "It's a little more like home health," she said.
To that end, the number of employees in general is smaller than that at other communities. Primarily, the nurses' stations of old are replaced by smaller workstations in corridors where staff can access supplies and computers. But what the community design didn't include is offices–something Stone said was a miss, resulting in some rooms needing to be repurposed to provide adequate workspace. "You must have office space," she urged.
Also reducing the visibility of operations is a pager system for staff in place of alarms or lights to notify them of resident calls.
Each household includes a laundry room equipped with a washer and dryer for staff to clean residents' items individually. However, Stone said she'd recommend adding space for higher-grade equipment, as staff have found that commercial machines would be more suitable for bed linens and towels.
Other lessons learned included the need for an appropriate rehabilitation space, as residents instead are frequently rehabbed in their rooms or where extra space is readily available–although the one-on-one sessions have actually proven be very successful. She also advised not to go to the extra expense of putting lifts in each room, with the alternative being to install tracks alone and only the number of lifts that are needed (in this case, only about six are actively in use), allowing the ability to shave costs and add more later, if necessary.
Overall, the homelike alternative to the nursing home of old is working, Stone said, with staff and residents alike satisfied with the more residential environment. The community benefits from frequent volunteers and lots of visiting families who contribute to the comforts of home, too.
