Our Culture
Traditionally, nursing homes too often represented a devaluation of elders and loss of control, of choice, of relationships. Seeking to offer something better than the traditional hospital model of care, beginning in 1997, FBH became an early pioneer in the long-term care field, working to change fundamentally the values, practices and culture of their organizations, to create places for living and growing rather than for decline. Now the Fairport Baptist Homes is proud to be a leader in the nation-wide culture change movement that is all about living in nursing homes, not about dying. By 2000, FBH, along with a small group of long term care communities, founded, championed, and implemented the Pioneer Network, embracing a new model of health care delivery for the elderly that is life-affirming, satisfying, and humane. Today, the impact of the Pioneer Network, the umbrella organization for the culture change movement, can be seen not only in Upstate New York but throughout the country.
Fairport Baptist Homes seeks to provide exceptional resident-directed care, whether in the nursing home or in the community. This ongoing transformation is based on person-directed values that restore control to elders and those who work closest with them, including changed core values, new choices about the organization of time and space, relationships, language, rules, objects used in everyday life, rituals, contact with nature, and resource allocation.
The first principle of this reform model is strikingly simple, yet powerful: “Residents First.” In FBH’s Pioneer setting, residents are given back responsibility for many of the decisions that affect their daily lives. Fairport Baptist Homes acknowledges the full range of residents’ interests, rather than just their medical needs, and embodies quality improvement in management style and a team-focused environment that recognizes that problems occur in the process or system, rather in the individuals. Care is decentralized into separate, self-contained, more homelike “households” instead of rooms off a long hallway. In the 1990′s, FBH retrofitted its physical plant to accommodate this culture change, in a campus renovation and construction project completed in 1999.
At Fairport Baptist Homes today, families expect that the nursing home will act as a loving, caring guardian for residents, providing excellent health care in a homelike setting, serving as a nurturing extension of the family, where the quality of life is just as important as the quality of care.
