Best Practice at Fairmount Home

Jemma Dooreleyers | Jun 26, 2024

Staff, residents and family members of Fairmount Home, the Frontenac County owned licensed long-term care facility located in Glenburnie, celebrated becoming an official Registered Nurse’s Association of Ontario (RNAO) Best Practices Spotlight Organization (BPSO) pre-designate, at a launch party along with Deputy Warden Ron Vandewal, MPP John Jordan and other Frontenac County members on Tuesday, June 18.

Out of 627 long-term care facilities across Ontario, there are 87 that have taken up this commitment.

The RNAO’s BPSO designation program is designed by nurses working in long-term care facilities to encourage the best quality of life possible for people living in these homes. By working towards becoming a BPSO, Fairmount Home’s staff is announcing to the province of Ontario, their peers, and the people living at Fairmount Home that they are committed to implementing and upholding evidence-based best practices that ensure wellness and happiness to the clients of Fairmount over a timeframe of just over two years.

Rebecca McKeowen, one of the nurse practitioners and BPSO Leads at Fairmount Home is responsible for spearheading this initiative for the home. Mckeowen has been passionate about evidence-based best practices since she was a nursing student. When other staff expressed interest in becoming a BPSO pre-designate, she reached out to the RNAO for a partnership in this initiative.

“We are always looking to support the residents at Fairmount the way they would want to be supported and we recognize that to improve the quality of care here at Fairmount Home we needed to start including evidence-based practices within that,” she said.

According to McKeowen, the committee responsible for attracting attention to the need for evidence-based best practices did not want to define and uphold these standards in isolation, which is why they partnered with the RNAO - because they already have defined best-practice standards and have shown outcomes of what a best-practice organization can provide for clients of long-term care facilities.

“When I saw that there was a best-practices pre-designation it seemed like a perfect fit for improving the quality of care here,” she said.

The launch party MC was Frontenac County Deputy Warden Ron Vandewal. It included: a performance from Fairmount’s bell choir, a speech given by Rebecca McKewen and her committee, a video made up of positive testimonies from residents at the home, a speech from the head of the Family committee and a speech from MPP John Jordan.

Jordan expressed the importance of initiatives such as BPSO pre-designation for long-term care facilities across the province. He hopes that the investments the Ontario Government has put towards long-term care facilities will increase evidence-based care being implementation in care facilities after the “perfect storm” that the COVID-19 pandemic created for the long-term care system.

“It’s been a challenge but certainly the investments are there,” said Jordan. “I think as time goes on and new facilities are opened and older ones get refurbished, they need to be bound by the same standards.”

“Some of the stories we heard during COVID can’t happen again so we (the Ontario Government) are hoping to double the number of inspectors, set higher standards and continue to follow up to make sure the standards are followed.”

Fairmount Home has approximately 400 people on their housing waitlist.

The Home’s staff have agreed to uphold these best practices based on the workplace environment and their passion for the clients. While their wages will not increas,e they will receive other incentives such as a BPSO educational course.

Part of the pre-designation process is outlining which of the RNAO’s Best-Practice Guidelines (BPG) the staff at Fairmount Home are committed to improving. The staff have chosen three BPGs to commit to. The first one is a person and family-centred care. This ensures that the needs of each client will be prioritized to the best of Fairmount’s abilities and their families will be informed and considered every step of the way.

The second BPG that staff have committed to maintaining is streamlining transitions of care and services which will ensure that no client gets left behind when being transitioned throughout the healthcare system based on their needs on any given day.

The last BPG outlined is the prevention of pressure-based injuries. Pressure-based injuries are injuries that occur when someone has been lying down or sitting for a long period of time. Currently Fairmount Home reports a higher than an average number of pressure-based injuries and they are committed to reducing this number.

In two years, if Fairmount Home has maintained these best practices, they will become a BPSO designate.