Registered nurse Jasmine Mitchell works at her desk Wednesday afternoon at HealthWatch in Liberal. L&T photo/robert Pierce

Transcription

1 {m4v}healthwatch{/m4v} High Plains Today Registered nurse Jasmine Mitchell works at her desk Wednesday afternoon at HealthWatch in Liberal. L&T photo/robert Pierce By ROBERT PIERCE 1 / 5

2 Leader & Times Mays Home Care was founded in 1978 to provide an alternative to premature institutionalization for the elderly and disabled in Oklahoma. Since then, the agency has expanded its coverage area. The company now serves Oklahoma and Northeast Texas in more than 30 locations. Mays has stayed on the cutting edge of technology to provide a new standard of home care with the addition of anodyne therapy, home telemonitors and our pediatric program with the continued additions of new programs to improve quality of life and care for all patients. One of Mays 30 locations, HealthWatch, was started in Liberal about a year and a half ago by executive director Stan Sweeney, who started HealthWatch in HealthWatch would later be purchased by Mays about 10 years ago and is now under the umbrella of Mays. The Liberal location is the first in Kansas, and in addition to its Oklahoma locales, HealthWatch likewise has facilities in Texas. Sweeney said the company could expand even further into Kansas. I ve been talking with some other agency owners, he said. Right now, Medicare home care is a little bit under the gun, not just home care but all of Medicare services themselves. A lot of agency owners are struggling against the increased documentation. 2 / 5

3 Sweeney said this is because regulations have created an environment in which home care has become more about documentation than it has about the care nurses can provide. We have been able to grow both our nursing staff and being able to meet the regulatory requirements out there, so we ve been able to grow, he said. There s lots of agencies out there that are now looking at another way out, and we just happen to be that. Sweeney said HealthWatch is primarily Medicare-based and provides services such as skilled nursing. That means there has to be an RN or an LPN that actually goes out to the home, he said. There has to be a skilled reason for them to be out there. We also provide the therapy services for speech therapy. We have home health aids. Sweeney said HealthWatch workers only go out on the orders of doctors, but the company works closely with district planners and hospitals, as well as local doctors and specialty physicians from Liberal, Amarillo, Texas, and Denver. We always look at our inpatients that we get as a referal from the district planners or the physicians, he said. They re primarily homebound. Homebound doesn t necessarily mean you have to be bed bound. It does mean that there has to be a reasonable and taxing effort for them to get out. We look at that as one of the requirements, also if there s a skilled need for any of those services that we provide, the skilled nursing or the PT. Sweeney said Liberal s HealthWatch location is likely the only such home health agency within a 100-mile radius. We re a little unique in the service that we provide, he said. There s other agencies that provide private duty services. One of the unique things is we ve been around for so long. We have a whole department that provides education to our nurses. We have a department that provides education to the patients that are out there, to physicians. We ve been around long enough that we ve built those systems that we see are needed the most in the home. 3 / 5

4 Sweeney himself is part of the aging Baby Boomer population, and as that generation gets older, he said they have become more astute of the care they want. We don t want to go to the nursing home, and we don t want to go to the hospital unless it s absolutely necessary, he said. We want to be treated in home. In this sense, Sweeney said Baby Boomers are demanding the types of services HealthWatch provides. Registered nurse Lucia Ramirez, who is the director of nursing for Liberal s HealthWatch location, said one reason older people prefer care at home is that it is easier for them to learn what they are being taught in a comfortable setting. Sweeney said HealthWatch first makes a visit to the home to assess the home environment, particularly how well it contributes to a patient s recovery. Ramirez said home care also puts people back with the medicines they are used to. When they go back home, they go back to their vitamins and supplements that they usually take when they re at home, she said. Some of them can contradict with some of the medications they got when they got discharged from the hospital. We look at all that medication. With Ramirez in place at the local location, Sweeney said HealthWatch has the benefit of a bilingual staff. Liberal and the surrounding area being a lot predominantly Hispanic, Lucia s able to communicate with them, and so is some of our other staff, he said. 4 / 5

5 Locally, HealthWatch is located at 502 N. Kansas in Liberal and also at 1203 N. Ellison in Guymon, Okla. For more information, call , , or / 5