2009 Optima Award

 

The Rolling Fields family has been selected to receive Long Term Living Magazine’s Optima Award for Excellence.  We received the award for our new 24-hour made-to-order culinary experience; we call “Jump Off The Cliff.”  Our extraordinary team will be featured on the cover of September’s issue of Long Term Living Magazine.  Our home will celebrate with an awards presentation ceremony and champagne reception on September 10^th, 2009.  

Rolling Fields has spent the past two years implementing the largest and most important nursing home culture change project imaginable.  We call it Jump off the Cliff or JOTC for short.  We are changing life for our Elders, a change that other nursing homes will soon begin to imitate and implement with our help.  This project enables us to offer our Elders 24-hour made to order room service and restaurant dining options.  We have found no other nursing homes that have made this transition.  The change was much more than just adding a restaurant menu and calling it room-service.  We have worked with a team of caregiver volunteers to reconstruct our whole way of caring for Elders in a nursing home environment.  This has changed the way we do everything in our home.  As you can imagine, by allowing our 175 Elders sleep in and order breakfast when they rise, changes staff scheduling, culinary staffing, medication management and delivery, therapy scheduling, as well as household chores and job descriptions across the board.  NOW after 2 long years of trials and renovations, we launched “JUMP” house-wide on December 16^th, 2009. 

Our home is a part of the Eden Alternative Culture Change worldwide movement.  The Eden philosophy gives its members the tools to change life for Elders in long term care facilities.  We have had many other area (and other not so local) homes make the trek to Rolling Fields to see what we are doing with hopes that our journey will help them implement the same in their homes. 

This endeavor is life-changing for the Elders of our community.  This change is truly one of the largest steps ever taken toward de-institutionalizing our nursing home.