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Nursing Homes For the Rest of Us
New Old Age Blog, The New York Times
February 25, 2009
One snowy New Year’s Eve, in a cabin by Lake George in upstate New York, Dan Reingold, the 54-year-old C.E.O. of the Hebrew Home for Aged in Riverdale, shared a bottle of single-malt Scotch with a group of friends and asked them to imagine a nursing home that wouldn’t make baby boomers like themselves say, “Over my dead body.”
He was already running one of the nation’s finest skilled nursing facilities, the one where my late mother lived the last two years of her life. But men and women who came of age during World War II and the Depression were a breed onto themselves. They put up with double rooms, showers down the hall, linoleum floors and coffee that arrived at the breakfast table lukewarm from a central kitchen. They tolerated all of this, in my experience, better than their adult children, who had vastly higher expectations and loads of guilt.
This physical environment that my mother never complained about left me weeping in the car on the way home from each visit. What kind of daughter abandons her mother to such a fate? Even after I came to appreciate the quality of care she was receiving, and my brother and I received as well, the place itself, while spotlessly clean, stirred in me a sense of failure that never went away. I’ve described it here often, to Mr. Reingold’s dismay.
He wishes I’d lighten up on the accounts of wheelchairs hubcap-to-hubcap in the lounge, and instead point my gaze to the facility’s sweeping views of the Hudson River, south past the George Washington Bridge to the tip of Manhattan, where the Twin Towers once stood. Or better yet, he often has said, I should come take a look at the new building, named for his late father Jacob Reingold, who ran the Hebrew Home before him, which had been a construction site when my mother died in 2003.
The Jacob Reingold Pavilion, which I’ve now visited, is the result of Mr. Reingold’s informal focus group in Lake George. At the time, a more conventional version of that building was already on the drawing board, approved by the board of directors and expected to cost $24 million. But as his friends answered the question, “What do we want?,’’ Mr. Reingold took notes and reconsidered.
Private rooms. Internet access. A fitness center. Massage rooms. Kitchens in each dining area, so the coffee is hot and the toast crispy. Electronic medical records to eliminate the need for nursing stations. Windows that face the river, positioned so someone in a wheelchair can enjoy the view. And showers in each room to eliminate the indignity of being wrapped in a sheet and wheeled down the public hallway.
He scrapped the existing project, asked his board to approve a new building that would cost $50 million and raised the money privately. “What we tried to do is move the bar,’’ he said, “make it as good as it can be. This is where long-term care needs to go before it’s you and me. What I designed here is a clinically supportive environment that doesn’t look, feel or smell clinical.”
“I look at it and say to myself, ‘If i needed nursing care, would I live here?’ And my answer is definitely yes.”
Mine, too. In fact, it crossed my mind to wonder if I could have used the indoor swimming pool if my mother had lived there. Her floor, by the way, in an adjacent building, will soon undergo a $700,000 renovation. “We can’t do it all in one shot,’’ Mr. Reingold said. “And unfortunately, when you have to do it in stages, it’s like buying a new suit. It makes your shoes look old.”
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