HISTORY
My Passion is to make a significant contribution to Changing the Face of Dementia Care in our society and to be an advocate for all seniors with dementia in their quest to maintain their Basic Human Right to Dignity, Choice and Quality of Life until their death.
My own mother, Evelyn Holly, passed in 1996. She spent the last 7 years of her life being bounced from one nursing home or residential dementia facility to another and in and out of hospital geri-psych units, because of her so called "challenging and aggressive behavior". The last year of her life she spent, strapped in a chair and drugged to make her "compliant" in her environment. I imagine many of you have had similar experiences.
After many years of heartache and frustration struggling to find appropriate care for my own mother, and after being told repeatedly by others in the healthcare industry, that the kind of dignified care that I visualized, was impossible since
it was TOO EXPENSIVE, I found I could not find any financial support for trying something different. I decided to use my own life savings to try to develop a model of specialized dementia care that would focus on the currently unmet emotional and spiritual needs of persons with dementia, who have become unable to communicate those needs, in addition to their physical needs.
I left my job as a Regional Sales Manager for a BBQ Rib company, and at 55 became the founder, owner and CEO of Lakeview Ranch Inc, a place where people with dementia, and their families, could call home and where they could live out their lives with the love, dignity and quality of life they deserve. Today we have 2 rural residential homes in MN, with 85 highly skilled staff that do very specialized dementia care that meets our resident's emotional and spiritual needs in addition to their physical needs. We focus on each resident's remaining abilities, allowing for the highest quality of life possible, while maintaining dignity and individual choice
With the help of 15 seasoned health care workers I started this project in 1999. The Lakeview Ranch Model of Specialized Dementia Care has proven that these unspoken and unmet needs are the underlying cause of most challenging and aggressive behavior and the #1 reason for all the rampant unnecessary hospitalizations and overmedication that has sent healthcare costs spiraling out of control to say nothing of robbing our seniors of the dignity and quality of life they so deserve.
Using the Lakeview Ranch Model of Specialized Dementia Care, loyal staff provides the residents the tender, gentle care I had hoped to find for my own mother. This model is based on meeting the individual needs of each resident, thus restoring their dignity, and incorporates:
- High staff-resident (1:3) ratios,
- Frequent, rigorous staff training (using specialized curriculums),
- In house direct RN coverage for individualized, proactive disease management and direct coordination with physicians,
- Appropriate activities including extensive animal therapy,
- Compassionate, palliative end of life care for both the resident and family.
From the beginning I have chosen to serve ALL persons with dementia regardless of their financial ability, which has taken all of my life savings. When I knew I could no longer supplement payment out of my own personal savings, and realizing the government would only pays about 2/3 of what it costs to do this appropriate level of care, I had to find another way, I refused to cut the staff levels and specialized training that were working, AND chose not to limit services to only wealthy private pay persons. I knew there had to be another vehicle to raise the money necessary to continue this kind of care. The Dementia Care Foundation, a MN non-profit 501c3 was born to provide scholarship funding
TOGETHER -- WE CAN CHANGE THE FACE OF DEMENTIA CARE IN AMERICA AND AROUND THE WORLD.