Wingate Healthcare: Hospitality of Healthcare - Health Executive - RedCoat Publishing - Inside Healthcare

The underlying theme in every venture undertaken by Wingate Healthcare is ‘We can do it better.’ With the advent of a drastically changing nursing home demographic, that drive to continually improve by blending healthcare with hospitality has served the company well for the past 20-plus years.

Scott Schuster, President and CEO

According to Scott Schuster, president and CEO of Massachusetts-based Wingate Healthcare, which he co-founded with his father Gerry, today’s skilled nursing patients are older and have higher acuity healthcare conditions but don’t consider themselves nursing home patients. “The majority are short-term rehabilitation patients,” he said. “The industry is also driven by a change in federal reimbursements that focuses more on post-acute patients, getting them out of hospitals faster, and getting them into secondary settings where they can rehabilitate at a lower cost. As a result, we’ve seen our resident profile change before our eyes.”

Many of Wingate’s skilled nursing facilities were originally built with adult daycare centers, and in the late ’80s and early ’90s, they were full. Over time, Scott and his father realized the space was no longer being fully utilized. Consequently, they converted those 2,000-square-foot spaces to rehabilitation gyms, installed more gym equipment, and added rehabilitation and therapist offices to serve the needs of the short-term rehab patients coming through the doors in greater numbers every day.

“It’s been a process, but it’s also been a remarkable change,” Schuster said. “Having birthdays for 100-year-old residents today is not uncommon. Back in the mid-’80s, patients in their 70s were the norm. Today, patients in their 80s and 90s are the norm. The evolution of this population and their changing demands brought us to the Pavilion Suites program.”

The next level
The roots of the Wingate brand began in the 1960s when Scott’s father began developing, managing, and syndicating government-assisted and subsidized housing across the country. Then, in the early 1980s, the tax law changes that came with the Reagan administration changed it all. In looking for a real estate-synergistic business with growth potential, the father and son duo believed skilled nursing facilities were the way to go.

“We took a long, hard look at the nursing home business, and we felt very strongly that it was similar to what we had been doing for years in the housing business,” Schuster said. “It had a real estate platform, and we understood how to develop and acquire the real estate. We had to deal with state and federal agencies for our licenses, permits, and even our reimbursement, and the nursing home business was inherently dependent on federal and state subsidies similar to the multi-family apartments under HUD, Section 8, and state housing finance agency programs.”
They made the switch, developed Wingate Healthcare, and started a pilot program at three sites across Massachusetts and Connecticut. They became licensed, developed the building plans, built the initial three facilities, and began operating. “That’s when we figured out we’d made a mistake,” Schuster said. “It turned out to be a complex and challenging operating business, but as we settled in, we knew we could do a good job.”

One of their initial points of intrigue was that many of the homes in the industry were old and outdated. The nursing home industry had a mixed reputation with the long-term-care focus, and the short-term-care focus hadn’t emerged to meet the expectations of the new patients who needed it. “When we first got involved in the business, it was more cut and dried; the hospitality piece was missing. We started changing that by building a better real estate platform. We wanted our facilities to feel like places people would live.”

In looking at the competition, they saw many had a lobby to fill out an application or a form, a place to be received, and a receptionist. But after a short walk, they would suddenly be in the nursing home or a patient corridor. “We looked and said, ‘This is a place where people live. Why shouldn’t the lobby be theirs? Why can’t our residents come into the lobby and sit and read and talk and meet the families? Why shouldn’t the activities room, dining room, and rehab center all be positioned off this main lobby where people can come and go and circulate for all the activity, centralizing the life of the residents?’”

In January 2006, Wingate introduced its Pavilion Suites program at its South Hadley, Mass. location, marking yet another step in the company’s marriage between healthcare and hospitality. Catering to the specific needs of this new generation of short-term patients, Pavilion Suites provide a higher level of privacy and luxury for those unable to find that level of attention in the more traditional short-term rehab nursing homes.

Built as a separate wing on pre-existing locations, Pavilion Suites provide residents with a private entrance, private rooms, and a higher level of personal attention. Wingate put many of its staff, including nurses aids, nurses, and laundry and housekeeping staff, through an intensive in-service training program focused on providing patients and their families many of the comforts they could find in a hotel while not forgetting the healthcare aspect of their visits.

“We’re not trying to trick anyone into believing we’re a hotel, but we also don’t want anyone to think we’re their grandmother’s nursing home,” Schuster said. “In the Pavilion Suites, we provide those nursing home services with a little sense of panache that makes the facilities a little warmer, a little more comfortable, a little more pleasant for everyone—the residents, their families, our staff—everyone that comes and goes through our doors in the course of the day.”

Already in three of the Wingate locations, including Andover, Mass., South Hadley, Mass., and East Longmeadow, Mass., locations in Needham and Sudbury, Mass. are being renovated, and another location in Kingston, Mass. is in the planning stages.

Although the Pavilion Suites is the newest development in Wingate’s mission to partner healthcare with hospitality, it’s not the only action the company has taken to meet its mission. In addition to instituting a noise-free environment for its patients, Wingate initiated a concierge program in many of its facilities. In an environment as challenging and busy as skilled nursing, said Schuster, employees rarely have time to consider going beyond their daily duties. The concierge program is the solution to that problem.

“Having one person with the time to answer questions and find information for people who need it is key. It could be as simple as ‘Can you check with the charge nurse and make sure she knows my father’s glasses were in the drawer?’ Little things may seem insignificant, but someone has to have the time to follow up and take care of the business at hand. We look at it as one of many goals we’ve accomplished by looking at what we do through our patients’ eyes.”

< Previous Story		Next Story >

CURRENT ISSUE

CATEGORIES

HEALTH SOLUTIONS