What’s your favorite thing about spring? Featherstone Plaza Retirement and Assisted Living

The birds singing and things are trying to grow and just the whole atmosphere. Betty Young

I guess the best part is the beginning when we’ve been sitting in winter so long and we’re tired of it. It just makes you feel good. Hassie Milner

To me it’s the Talimena Scenic Drive and seeing all the trees in bloom. Bill Brown

I just love things growing whether it’s flowers or whatever. James Smith

by Vickie Jenkins

The Birth Center at Deaconess hospital features eighteen elegantly appointed single-room maternity suites that allow mothers to share the birth experience with family in a beautiful, home-like atmosphere by staying in the same room for labor, delivery, recovery and postpartum care.  Nine-bed level-II NICU provides excellent care for babies who need additional medical attention. The NICU is staffed by registered nurses and board-certified neonatologists.  One-on-one nurse to patient ratio throughout the entire labor and delivery process.
Deaconess Hospital in Oklahoma City is known for their outstanding doctors and nurses. Picture: From L-R: Tanya Bogan, RN,  Yvonne Silberman RNC-OB,  Jonna Criscuoli, RN and Supervisor Trisha Brown, RNC-OB show the Sleep Sack Swaddle that each newborn receives at Deaconess.  The Sleep Sack is a Safe Sleep Initiative that was introduced February 14, 2014.
Here are some Safe Sleep Swaddle Tips to ensure a safe sleep for your baby. Always place baby to sleep on his or her back at naptime and night time.  Use a crib that meets current safety standards with a firm mattress that fits snugly and is covered with only a tight-fitting crib sheet.  Remove all blankets, comforters and toys from your baby’s sleep area (this includes loose blankets, bumpers, pillows and positioners).  The American Academy of Pediatrics suggests using a wearable blanket instead of loose blankets to keep your baby warm.  Offer a pacifier when putting baby to sleep. If breastfeeding, introduce pacifier after one month or after breastfeeding has been established.  Breastfeed, if possible, but when finished, put your baby back to sleep in his or her separate safe sleep area alongside your bed.  Room share, but don’t bed share.  Bed sharing can put a child at risk of suffocation.  Never  put your baby to sleep on any soft surface (adult beds, sofas, chairs, water beds, quilts, sheep skins etc.)  Never dress your baby too warmly for sleep.  Never allow anyone to smoke around your baby.
Deaconess Hospital is proud of their new Hugs and Kisses Security System as of January 2015.  The Hugs system offers the reliability that you and your staff can depend on every day to keep your infants safe.  The Hugs tag attaches in seconds and is automatically enrolled in the software.
Protection can start right in the delivery room.  The Hugs system requires no manual checks of infant tags or other devices to make sure they’re working. The Hugs system software -continually monitors the status of all devices, and will generate an alarm if something goes wrong.  There is an automatic mother/infant matching.  With the Kisses® option, the Hugs system automatically confirms that the right baby is with the right mother. There are no buttons to push and no numbers to match.
Deaconess Hospital offers Certified Lactation Consultants that round on all post-partum and NICU mothers.  Here you will find Neonatologists and Neonatal Nurse Practitioners on call 24/7 for high risk deliveries.

Like any good administrator, Brookhaven Extensive Care’s Mollie Woolridge is constantly looking for better ways to help her residents.
So when she heard about the Prevent Clinic and what it could do she was sold.
“We always want to give the best care for our residents so anything that’s new and can make their lives better or easier we want to try,” Wooldridge said. “What they pitched to us was what we needed because readmissions are an issue and these can prevent some. It can at least let us know when someone is declining.”
Enter John Murgai and Lee Rose with Prevent Clinic – an on-site health monitoring and management firm that specializes in identifying patients who are at-risk for hospital readmission.
Once those patients are identified, Prevent Clinic focuses on continued monitoring until the patient’s prognosis improves.
Patients in the Prevent Clinic – largely those with congestive heart failure – are examined once they begin the program and are then seen weekly.
“We know from the start if they are at risk and what to look for and they are monitored regularly by additional people,” Wooldridge said. “And it’s people that learn to know them.”
Brookhaven specializes in nursing care. And Dustin Schuler is the Director of Nursing.
From a clinical standpoint, he was all for using Prevent Clinic.
“It was just giving us an extra tool to care for the residents,” he said. “For a long time with skilled care you had to send them out to the hospital to get any kind of testing done. It was just a great option to help the residents.”
Wooldridge monitored the numbers and liked what she saw.
“When did this work? From the very beginning,” she said.
Prevent Clinic’s ultrasounds and dopplers are also at Schuler and his staff’s disposal.
“The technology the mobile x-ray has is pretty high-end,” he said.
“Once I got the nurses on board 100 percent it was definitely additional peace of mind,” he continued. “I think they like it, knowing there’s another test they could run. It gives them something else we can go to. They realize sending the resident to the hospital isn’t good for them and it isn’t good for the family.”
Health care reform has pinpointed hospital readmissions as a key area for improving care coordination and achieving potential savings.  Medicare patients have the largest share of total readmissions and the highest associated costs for readmission.
According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, there were approximately 3.3 million adult hospital readmissions in the U.S. in 2011. That resulted in $41.3 billion in additional hospital costs.
For Medicare patients, the No. 1 condition resulting in readmission was congestive heart failure which was responsible for 134,500 readmissions. Septicemia and pneumonia were the next two conditions responsible for the majority of readmissions. These three conditions alone resulted in $4.3 billion in hospital costs.
At a time when hospitals are trying to lower a patient’s length of stay, patients are unfortunately coming home sicker than before.
The thinking is that objective hemodynamic data can lead to better outcomes and ultimately a lower cost of care.
“It’s an added plus on our side because we do something nobody else does,” Wooldridge said.
Initially, Wooldridge admits her staff was leary of taking on a new process. But Murgai quickly won them over.
“Trying new things is always difficult because you don’t want to add more work to already overworked people,” Wooldridge said. “But I think this helps them in so many different ways. It’s not additional work it’s additional eyes on our residents. More people can see a decline or an improvement.”
Murgai said Brookhaven is the first facility to use Prevent Clinic’s optimized program.
“We test every patient here,” Murgai said. “Every patient gets tested … that way nothing falls through the cracks for them.”
And the cracks are where patients can slip through, leading them back to the hospital.
“Hospitals are where sick people are and people get sicker sometimes when they go there,” Rose said.
That’s why keeping them out of the hospital is the best prescription.

Story and photo by Jason Chandler, Staff Writer

Not every health care agency is accredited by the Joint Commission, but BrightStar Care operates with this distinction.
“It’s an accredidation that hospitals have to have, but very few home care companies would pursue because it’s hard work and it’s expensive,” said Ken Fearnow, president and administrator of BrightStar Care.
In 2013 Fearnow and his wife, Jannie, opened the private non-Medicare franchise agency in Edmond.
“Our slogan is ‘A Higher Standard of Care,’” Fearnow said. “What we hope to do is ensure a higher quality of life.”
The Fearnows believe that because of the types of services they provide that it is essential to hold themselves accountable to the highest quality of standards provided in the industry.
BrightStar serves the greater Oklahoma City metroplex by offering home care and medical staffing. A full range of services are provided in a client’s home, providing that they are well enough to stay at home and don’t need to be hospitalized, Fearnow said.
“It might be companionship and keeping people safe in their homes to people who don’t need a high level of personal care needs,” he said. “They just need safety and some help around the house, maybe light housekeeping and just preparing meals for them and those things.”
BrightStar also provides personal care services to people with a higher level of needs. They might have been discharged from the hospital and need some support in their house. Maybe they can’t get out of bed and they need help with transferring, walking and showering, Fearnow said.
“We also provide skilled nursing services,” Fearnow continued. “That would be anything from providing injections and withdrawing blood all the way to wound care.”
BrightStar also provides infusion therapy for certain types of patients.
“We like to hire people who have a heart for the work that they do,” Fearnow said. “And it’s kind of hard to test for until you get them in the field, but most of the people that are in this business are so because they have a lot of compassion. They really do it more for the satisfaction of helping other people.”
The nursing staff ranges from registered nurses to certified home health aides and certified nurse aides. These aides must have been certified for at least a year before BrightStar will consider hiring them.
“We just feel like they need to have some experience either working in a facility or working as a nurse aide before we want to put them with our clients,” Fearnow said. “We also require that they have CPR certification.”
There are also federal and state requirements for the nurse aides to have a 50-state criminal background check as well as checking the OSBI sex offender registry. They must also have a drug test and a negative tuberculosis test.
“We competency test them in various areas depending on the type of client they are going to see,” Fearnow said.
Members of the staff are in the business to enrich people’s lives, which is the focus of person centered care.
“They do it more for that than they do for the money,” Fearnow explained. “We have some caregivers — I can think of one in particular — who with more than one client we’ve had in their final hours; they’ve been holding hands and praying with them.”
Providing company is important to people who are mostly homebound or transferred with lifts and with varying degrees of disability.
“They require different expertise and different types of care,” Fearnow said. “To ensure this better quality of care, we try to match the likes and dislikes of the client with the likes and dislikes of the caregiver.”
Clients are contacted within 24 hours for feedback and to see if there is anything else that they need. Seven days later, the client is contacted again, followed by a once-a-month communication with the office. Surveys are sent to learn from the client how they are doing.
“We are in their home with them. We want to see how we are touching them at every stage,” Fearnow said.
Enriching the lives of other people by providing excellent care has also enriched Fearnow’s life.
“I always said, ‘The closer I get to the age of the people I’m caring for — and we have several that are about my age — the more important it is for me to provide the quality of care to them and the dignity I would want for myself.”
“It’s been a very rewarding business for me. My wife and I have enjoyed it very much.”

by Mike Lee
Staff Writer

Bettina Trice has dated the sexiest man alive. She’s traveled the world, had a world championship whippet and all those things still don’t come close to accurately portraying this unique 81-year-old.
Trice started painting when she was four, copying Dick Tracy out of the paper.
She’s lived her entire life by the philosophy you’re never bored if you’re an artist.
In the 1950s, Trice’s mother entered her in a beauty contest. The shy Oklahoma City girl made it to the stage but then figured out she had another problem.
“They accepted me and that night I said ‘Dear Jesus, what am I going to do. I don’t dance and I don’t sing,’” Trice remembers. “He gave me the message of doing art. I sketched the Mona Lisa in three minutes and would you believe I won.”
Trice went to Central High School growing up and then married
Through the years Trice has run Betty’s Gift Shop and she’s worked for Wolf & Wolf Advertising.
Art is life for Trice and one day she hopes to have her work displayed in an Oklahoma museum.
“It keeps you in touch with God,” she said.
For about a month, when she was still Betty Salmon, she found herself face-to-face with Harry Belafonte – voted at the time the sexiest man alive. She coyly asked for an autograph insisting it was for her sister.
“As I was walking away he asked if I could give him a ride,” Trice said. “We dated for over a month.”
She still remembers the first date when they went to a local restaurant.
“He said ‘I want you to go first because I wouldn’t want to embarrass you,’” Trice said. “I took his hand and told him if we couldn’t go in together I wasn’t going in. We went in and everyone stood up and applauded. Can you believe that in Oklahoma in the 1960s?”
In addition to the artwork that adorns her walls at Emerald Square Assisted Living Center, Trice has vacation photos of her and her husband in China and Italy. She spent a month touring China and visited the Great Wall. She’s dined at the luxury Hotel Cipriani in Venice, drinking wine with peaches for breakfast.
Her destinations have also included Japan, Europe and Mexico.
Trice and her husband – who owned Trice Electronics – had three children and plenty of grandchildren and great grandchildren have followed.
Those who may have dined at Sussy’s Italian Restaurant in Oklahoma City may remember the hand-painted mugs owner Jack Sussy used to give out. The Chicago native commissioned Trice to paint some 5,000 cups, each different.
“The waitresses didn’t like me very much because every time they came in they wanted to use their cup,” Trice said. “He finally put in some lazy susans. They didn’t think that was very funny.”
From time to time she gets approached by Emerald Square residents about painting self portraits or portraits of their animals.
She’s happy to oblige, painting almost every day.
Several of the paintings that hang on her wall are of her whippets.
During her life, Trice also became certified to teach tennis lessons. Her and husband built the first indoor tennis court in Oklahoma City.