For the week of July 18 - July 24, 2001

Leaders stress need for Blaine Manor

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By TRAVIS PURSER
Express Staff Writer

Facing possibly devastating financial problems, decision-makers for the county’s only skilled-care nursing home are turning their attention to educating the public about why Blaine Manor is important to healthcare in the Wood River Valley.

The county-owned home has recently suffered a sharp drop in revenue and escalating operating costs, and may lose some of its public funding when the county sets its budget this summer.

Blaine Manor may have to close.

That, the home’s administrators say, could cost the entire community more than keeping it open. And the Wood River Valley’s healthcare system in general would suffer.

There is an overemphasis on the kind of acute care that hospitals provide, Elizabeth Nesbit, director of nursing for the home, told Blaine Manor’s board of trustees during a meeting last Wednesday.

She said, for example, that under modern healthcare, if a man sitting on a park bench has a heart attack, he’s rushed to the hospital, treated, then put back on the bench and ignored until he gets sick again. A better idea, she said, would be to care for him while he’s on the bench, too, which is what Blaine Manor does.

One problem faced by Blaine Manor and most other nursing homes is "we’ve never put a dollar value" to strengthening the "continuum of healthcare," Nesbit said.

The home’s director, Gail Goglia agreed. On practical, rather than emotional, terms, she said, assisted living can be cheaper than food stamps, rent assistance and other subsidies needed to keep the community’s most frail and ill people living at home.

Also, she asked, "What is the impact of removing caregivers from the workforce?"

Goglia said she plans to increase awareness of these issues through more local advertising.

Discussion Wednesday also focused on ways to increase the home’s Medicare payments, which might require creating a formal affiliation between St. Luke’s Wood River Medical Center and the home.

Goglia was scheduled to present her budget request for the home to the Blaine County Commission today. The amount of that request was not available at press time.

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