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 10th, 2009.
Rolling Fields, located in Crawford County Pennsylvania, 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 16th, 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.
“I remember going into one elder's room with a tray,” Moody, who at the time was administrator, recalls. “She was sound asleep, mouth wide open, and snoring. I thought, ‘This is crazy! I can't wake her up to eat.’ It was an amazing revelation to me. Everything we did was revolving around meals. The answer was to get rid of our tray delivery service and offer 24-hour dining.”
Rolling Fields was selected for the 2009 Long Term Living Optima Award for their sensitive thinking 24-hour dining culture change. Articles about how it came about and the process that lead to success are chronicled on Long Term Living's website:
