Flourishing Communities: Sitter & Barfoot Veterans Care Center

Paige Mantel: Good morning, everybody. I know a few more people are joining us as we speak, so we'll get started in about 30 seconds. But while we're waiting for everybody, as many of you know, today's webinar is going to feature Sitter & Barfoot Veterans Care Center, and we would love to know for those of you that are joining us today. If you're a veteran or a service member, we'd love to hear about that in our chat window below, so, please, you know, share a little bit about that, and of course, thank you so much for your service.

Alright, let’s get started. So welcome everyone to our Flourishing Communities Webinar Series. This series puts a spotlight on senior living communities that are leveraging technology to create exceptional experiences. We have a full schedule set with community leaders throughout the country, running about every 2 weeks. I'm Paige Mantel, Chief Marketing Officer here at LifeLoop, and I'm thrilled to be your host for today's session.

I think most of our audience knows LifeLoop but to summarize, we have one goal: helping senior living communities flourish. We've been serving the senior living industry for 25 years with our technology solutions that help more than 4,700 communities engage their residents, delight their staff, and connect family members. Our discussion today will run for about 30 minutes. We welcome your questions and ask that you please put those in the Q&A box at the bottom of your screen. At the end of the webinar, please complete the short survey to provide your feedback on today's webinar.

As a follow up, in a few days you'll receive an email with the recording of today's session, so you can rewatch or share it with your colleagues. You'll also receive a link to download our newly published State of Senior Living and Technology Report, which is the fifth installment of an annual research study into the industry's changing needs and acute challenges, industry trends, and the evolving role of technology.

Now, to my amazing guests on today's episode. LifeLoop recently announced our Communities That Shine Award winners, and I'm thrilled to have one of our winners, Sitter & Barfoot Veterans Care Center, joining us today. Sitter & Barfoot Veterans Care Center won our Brilliance in Person-Centered Care Award based on their use of LifeLoop and iN2L engagement solutions to engage residents and improve communication between residents and family members. And we'll dive into how they're doing that with our time together today.

Jim Darragh is the Assistant Administrator, and Valerie Dodson is the Memory Care Programming Director at Sitter & Barfoot. Welcome, Jim and Valerie. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Jim Darragh: Thank you for having us.

Paige Mantel: Jim, let's start with you. Tell us a little bit more about Sitter & Barfoot Veterans Care Center.

Jim Darragh: Well, here, considering Barfoot, we're a Veterans Care Center, owned by the State of Virginia. Serving veterans, obviously, 200-bed facility, all private rooms, the equivalent of, you know, a skill nursing facility that you might find in the private sector.

Paige Mantel: Wonderful. And I know you've got a great story of how you got into senior living, and specifically in Sitter & Barfoot. Would you mind sharing that that story with us and some of your background?

Jim Darragh: Sure. Well, I think it fits into your question earlier on that. You know, who's a veteran on this call today and you know, I'm one of those. I was a 20-year US Navy veteran, shipboard engineer. Most of that, you know, throughout that career, lots of roles in logistics and also in leadership. And when I retired from the Navy, we went back to my wife's hometown in Vermont and the job that seemed to be available was in hospital facilities management, a local hospital there, and through my 17-year career with them, they gave me lots of opportunities to learn about things other than just facilities and how hospitals operate. And you know, anything from budgeting to how they're reimbursed and various other areas of leadership there, and they also own a 105-bed nursing home. They're a not-for-profit facility, and I eventually became interested in their work there, and became a licensed administrator. And the last couple of years there operating that facility.

And you know, from there my wife and I were visiting family here in the Richmond area, and she saw an ad for this position here in the Veterans Care Center, and it just seemed like a good fit. Our kids had all grown up, so we decided to come back to Virginia, where we spent a lot of my career and I grew up, and serve my fellow veterans.

Paige Mantel: Wonderful. And, Jim, how long have you been with Sitter & Barfoot?

Jim Darragh: 7 years. Yeah.

Paige Mantel: 7 years. Amazing. Well, again, thank you for your service. And thanks for sharing your story of how you got to where you are today. Valerie, let's hear from you. Tell us about your journey to senior living in your background.

Valerie Dodson: Yeah. So, I went to school to become a speech language pathologist. During my college career, my dad was diagnosed with a young onset dementia. And all of a sudden, my whole life flipped. So, when I thought I was gonna work with children, I realized that I could just relate so much better to the adult grown children of people who are living with dementia, and I had something to offer. And so that empathy, combined with the education, has just carried me forward into this path.

Paige Mantel: Wonderful, wonderful! And how long have you been with Sitter & Barfoot?

Valerie Dodson: 4 and a half years.

Paige Mantel: 4 and a half years. Wonderful!

Alright! Well, let's dive into what makes Sitter & Barfoot a flourishing community. Let's start with learning a little bit more about how you are delivering amazing experiences for your veterans. And, Jim, I want to start with your strategy and your philosophy around resident enrichment versus resident entertainment.

Jim Darragh: Yeah, that's been a, you know, a theme for me over the last few years. My last facility that I was referring to had a 52-bed memory care neighborhood, and here we have 40 beds. And I think it was through my interest in dementia, special care and memory care and the things that those folks need, that I started to develop the thought of, you know, entertainment versus engagement and started to work with my activities directors and some therapists, Valerie being one of them, and how we can distinguish between those two and really improve the lives of our veterans, not just in the dementia unit, but also throughout the facility. So I think, you know, I think we need a lot more engagement as human beings than we do entertainment and, you know, I sort of break that up. And you know what is well-being right, and well-being comes really from on our and our engagement right in meaningful activity, things that give us you know great interest in our lives. That, you know, that we're committed to like really has meaning for us, deep meaning for us as opposed to entertainment, which we all need as well. Probably need less of it, most of us, and more engagement and less entertainment. But entertainment being what you know, what I think people typically think of it as you know, just a way to amuse yourself, maybe distract yourself from some of the things going on in your life, and just unwind and unplug for a little bit.

And I think that you have to be focused on both of those, and I think we have to constantly trying to strive to figure out how to provide the engagement piece when someone's living in a nursing home and you know, has given up a lot of their freedoms and capability to do that. So, that’s what I'm interested in and that's what we're working on here.

Paige Mantel: Yeah, I think that you really hit on some important points. That concept of meaningful engagement, and really connecting with people's passions, their purpose, and continuing that in the community environment.

So, I think that difference between engagement/enrichment versus entertainment is really important, and I think the way you have developed your programs at Sitter & Barfoot really reflects that, so thanks for sharing your strategy about that.

Jim Darragh: My pleasure.

Paige Mantel: So, Valerie, you've had iN2L for about just over a year now. Tell me a little bit about some of the challenges you had prior to using iN2L with resident engagement and enrichment, you know, that helped you see that iN2L would be helpful for you.

Valerie Dodson: Yeah. So memory care is nothing if not unpredictable. And so, we would find ourselves ready for an activity that may have worked in the past, so we have all of our supplies, and we're set up and we're ready to go, and we realize that the residents aren't clicking with it, for whatever reason, that day. And before that would mean a walk down the hall to the storage closet, where we kept all of our CDs or our you know, musical activities, or all of our things were not in the same place where our activities were happening. And so, thinking on our feet happened all the time, and we would be sort of stuck for a few minutes with whatever we could grab onto quickly.

Whereas now, with the iN2L there’s just so much content that if one thing is not working, we can switch in seconds to doing something else. And so that fast switch, and that vast amount of content has just changed how we're able to make sure that we're not continuing to do something that doesn't fit the needs of those residents in that moment.

Paige Mantel: That's great. I think you highlight the point of making, you know, with the lack of predictability, being able to read your audience, read what's happening for them. Are they engaging? Are they not engaging? Are they pulling away? And be able to make a switch really, really quickly, to meet their needs. So that's great.

So now that you have iN2L are you using it with residents? Walk us through, you know, a typical day, and how you're using it.

Valerie Dodson: Yeah. So I'll say a couple of things about that. So, before we get to a typical day, even the monthly calendar I was sitting down doing June's calendar yesterday, and the content that they send us, you know, with ideas for every single day is, we're able to have predictability of what the residents, what we know they always like. But we're also able to shake things up a bit without me having to scour the Internet to figure out, you know, well, what should we be doing on Flag Day, for example? Which is June fourteenth. So, you know it there, that structure at the beginning of the month helps us.

But then, also we use the example of our Veterans Day service that we did when we filled out our application for this award. And so, it's a really great example of how a day can go for us, change quickly. So, for example, we were livestreaming an event from Washington, DC. And it was a Veterans Day event, and the residents were into it. They were clapping, they were, you know, along with whatever was happening on TV, they were engaged. About 20 minutes went by, and we had planned on watching the entire about 40 minutes activity that was from DC. But 20 minutes went by, and I realized they weren't really jiving with what was happening anymore, they had kind of lost interest. And so, with iN2L we were able to quickly turn it off, and I used the military songs that are on the programming, and we switched, and we played each military song and had residents stand up, if that was their branch.

And it's really awesome to watch to be able to easily have these guys involved in their military background and celebrate that, there's always a little bit of back and forth banter between some of the different branches, and so that's always fun to see. After that we went right onto a slideshow about Veterans Day and ran that slide show and had that music running while people went through our buffet line to get their food. We were able to project and have a prayer before the meal. And then afterwards we shared pictures that families had sent in that weren't able to attend. And so when you ask about a typical day, you can take any theme and just sort of quickly go through it like that.

Paige Mantel: That is amazing. That is great. You mentioned about some around the photos, and we'll get into that a little bit more. But I love the way you kind of take the multitude of different content types from music to livestream to video, to all of that, to really, you know, center on a theme for the day.

So, let's talk about seniors interacting with the technology. What are you seeing? How do they engage with the technology today, and how are you maybe seeing even that change over the course of the year that you've had iN2L?

Valerie Dodson: Yeah, so we have a variety of residents that live on our memory care unit. And so, there are some that are non-communicative and there are some that can have full on conversations and debates. And so having the iN2L system has been really unique for us, because we actually have 2 machines. And so one, we can keep running for like a large group activity. And then the other one, we can take individual residents away that aren't jiving with whatever the big group activity is, and offer them something more to however their current level is presenting in that moment.

So, for example, the aquarium that you can touch and feel and get a lot of sensory information from, if we have someone who's, you know, wandering out of the room because they don't need all the simulation of a big group activity, one on one they can touch and make changes to those tactile options that are available. Or if we're doing something, and someone seems like they need more stimulation than that, then we can take them in the other room and look up things on the Internet and current events that they want to discuss.

And so, it's interesting because we've had a resident for quite a few years who's never expressed any interest in voting. And what we've discovered this year is he is making a plea with his family, he wants to go and vote, and I know that that change came because of what we're able to provide through LifeLoop through the iN2L content and checking the Internet and being involved. He's gonna go vote. And so, we're just kind of excited and proud of the individualization that we can do with that.

Paige Mantel: That's amazing. I love that story about the gentleman who decided he wanted to vote because he felt more connected with what the issues were right through, you know, being in touch with all of that information through the system. That's a great example. Thanks for sharing that.

Jim Darragh: I think that's, you know, that's an engagement versus entertainment use of it right? Obviously, there's something in this gentleman's history which you know, brought up his desire to vote and so that actually had, you know, real meaning for him, and not that it doesn't for everybody, but at least for this individual, I think demonstrates that, as opposed to you know, the entertainment piece that we were talking about a little bit.

Paige Mantel: Yeah, such a good example of really sparking that engagement. Thanks, Jim.

So I know that the iN2L system, we now have over, I think, 6,500 pieces of content. It's a lot, but I bet there are some favorites at your community. What are what are some of the must-haves daily fun, you know, fun and engagement activities that your residents just can't get enough of?

Valerie Dodson: Yeah. So, we're a music-heavy place to be. We use a lot of Teepa Snow training and recommendations as far as what she believes builds a meaningful day. And so, she recommends over 2 hours of music a day, and we've just watched that blossom.

We've watched people just enjoy the karaoke that we have, enjoy the jukebox feature. They know all the words to all the karaoke songs, and even more than that, staff will come in and start humming along or singing along, or I'll watch them smiling when a certain song comes on. And the variety, you just can't beat, the variety of music that we can play. And so it's been really amazing. That's definitely a favorite of ours is definitely the music. We love all the trivia and laughing at ourselves when we don't know the answers.

We definitely are enjoying the YouTube feature. You know, to be 100% honest, I had never thought about scouring YouTube to find, you know, content. We call it ‘we go down rabbit holes.’ So, we start off in in one topic, and then something happens and it sparks another topic. And we're able to find a lot of information on YouTube to end up down some of our rabbit holes sometimes, and those end up being some of the most fun that we have.

Paige Mantel: I love that, I love that. Now, Valerie, do you have a go-to karaoke song?

Valerie Dodson: Oh, gosh. We all are loving Elvira! It's definitely one of the favorites that I never would have listened to in the past.

Paige Mantel: Great. What about you, Jim?

Jim Darragh: Yeah. And I well, about my karaoke favorite. But I wanted to mention, you know, because this you know, our non-dementia residents are using this as well, and I find there that there’s a lot of interest in these walking tours or aerial tours, or revisiting locations where they may have visited or served when they were in their military careers. And so, there's a lot of that that's used to find that fascinating.

Paige Mantel: The travel and those experiences and rekindling those memories can be quite powerful, yeah.

Valerie Dodson: Yeah, we had a wife visit who didn't quite really know how to engage her husband, and she used to kind of talk down about him. And they had lived in Germany, and so I pulled up the town where they lived, and all of a sudden, he was talking about the places that they visited. And so, they ended up engaging with that for quite a while to talk about years ago, where they had lived, and they had an awesome visit, and I think it was kind of like a light bulb for that wife. It was neat.

Paige Mantel: Wow! That is so powerful, because when family members aren't sure how to connect you know, with their loved one that you know might have cognitive decline, being able to help support them through using that content is quite powerful. So a great example of that.

Alright, let's talk about your staff. Obviously, a big part of success with any technology solution is training and getting your staff comfortable using it and making sure that this helps the staff do their job, you know, and keep them focused on that resident engagement. I would love to hear a little bit more, Valerie, from you. How have you trained the staff to use iN2L? And how are they using it today?

Valerie Dodson: Yeah, so we have probably around 12, what I would consider to be ‘super users’, people that just know this stuff inside and out. And then what we were able to do was train another approximately 40 CNAs. And when we say train, it was hands-on. What I asked them to do was think of any resident that they take care of and think of one thing that they knew about that resident. And I was able to show them how you can type in and search for any one thing, and with that they were able to see what they could offer a resident, and so I actually made them touch it. You know, this wasn't a PowerPoint presentation. It was hands-on. ‘Who do you know in this facility? And what do you think you could do to spend a few minutes with them?’ And that was the goal. I only asked for 5 minutes, because a lot of CNAs will say, ‘I don't have time for that.’ And so, asking for these short bursts of time, I found that they stick around for a little bit more than 5 minutes. So, it was really neat to do hands-on training in that way, that specific, so that they got to choose the resident that they wanted to talk about that they knew one thing about.

Paige Mantel: Yeah. Those are great best practices, because I think you hit on a key point of first of all, having enough super users that really know how to use the technology and know where to find things and make, you know, making it easy for everybody. But having the 40 CNAs, and just a quick 5 minutes, just to show how easy it is, how easy it is to search and find that content, really helps everybody get the best use out of the technology to help them do their job. So great, great, best practice.

Has your staff been surprised now that they're using the technology with residents? Any surprises for them?

Valerie Dodson: Yeah. So, one gentleman in particular comes to mind because he is pretty much nonverbal and we pushed him right up in front of the machine, anyway, and we played a game that's similar to Hangman, it's called Balloon Burst. If you have iN2L and you haven't found Balloon Burst, go find that one. And so other residents were guessing the letters and a few of the letters were filled in, and all of a sudden this particular gentleman just said what the word was. And nobody had ever heard him say a word before.

And so we kept going, and he gets multiple words very often and come to find out, his wife came to visit, and we found out that they used to go, weekly, to a local diner and played a game similar to Wheel of Fortune. And so, he had this in his background somewhere. And so now people see him a little bit differently. He still doesn't talk, he will read single words, and so we have him reading short phrases. But they see him a little bit different now that we figured out that he can read.

Paige Mantel: Amazing. And Jim, isn't that another amazing example of what you're talking about with enrichment and engagement?

Jim Darragh: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, I think that's hard to hard to replace those kinds of interactions for sure. And this technology, I think, you know, is enhancing our ability to have those experiences.

Paige Mantel: Yeah, yeah. We mentioned, Valerie mentioned, a little bit about family members. Jim, what percentage of your residents have family members that are nearby, within the same town, or within 45 minutes to easily come visit? What percentage versus those that live further away?

Jim Darragh: Yeah, I would say, it's probably 70% or so. Maybe even a little bit higher, that yeah, there are a lot of them, you know, in the greater Richmond area. And some that may be a little bit more than 45 minutes away. But, you know, most of them are close by.

Paige Mantel: That's great. So you definitely have people coming in and visiting. What about when you think about what are the unique challenges of those that that live further away, the 30% that are not in the Richmond area? What are some of the challenges you have with keeping them connected with their loved ones?

Jim Darragh: Yeah. Well, I think it's not unique. It's the same challenges we all face when someone's living in a, you know, senior community, whether it's assisted living or nursing home, other type of community living setting. But you know this, I think, has given us the opportunity, Valerie started talking about it and gave you some specific cases where, you know, it's another tool for which we can allow them to interact through, you know, videos and photographs. You know, that can be received into the system.

So, I think any anytime that we can enhance that communication capability. This is just another type of communication that the resident can have with their with their loved one when they can't be here. And you know, can experience, you know, something that maybe they couldn't attend. And there's a video that's sent from a wedding, or, you know, family reunion or some other event. Then they get to see a little piece of that and, reminds me about the quick story way back, when I was in Vermont in that nursing home, we did one of the first, I think, sort of FaceTime videos, if you will. And the technology was a little choppy and all, but we had a woman there who couldn't go to California and see her granddaughter get married and was able to participate, you know, with a computer screen. And again, not like today's technology, but enough of it. And we set the room up, for, you know, a cake, and she got all dressed up and that kind of thing. And so, I think that's the same kind of thing here at a much more advanced level than what we were able to do, you know, 10 years ago.

Paige Mantel: Yeah, look at you trail blazing 10 years ago. That's awesome. And Valerie, so tell us more, some of the stories of what you're seeing with families engaging, now that they can communicate through iN2L.

Valerie Dodson: Yeah. So, one of the really great features that we're enjoying is having, like Jim said, the short videos. There are a lot of residents on the memory care unit especially, but on other units as well, that are just missing their families. We can have a family come and visit, and an hour later, that person is still looking for the person who came to visit them. So, you know, if their wife was here, and their wife might have even stayed for hours, and then their wife eventually has to leave, and so now they're looking for their wife.

And what we found is when we know that families are gonna do that, we can coach the family through making some kind of a video that brings the resident’s anxiety down. And so we have lots of short videos of just reassurance, of I love you, and you're in a safe space, and I'll be back really soon.

But then we also have a lot of fun stuff, too. So, when residents have new grandchildren, we ask for pictures and we ask for videos, and we get permission from the families to be able to share those as a community. We have one of the large systems, one of the 52-inch TVs, and we can pull up, you know, a baby cooing on the TV. And all of a sudden we get smiles, and one lady that says, ‘Oh, baby,’ even though she hardly says any words.

So we get this sharing of things that is just really special that builds community between us, but also makes the resident feel really good that they're able to share, you know, what's going on outside of this place.

Paige Mantel: Wow! Those are great examples of using the power of family videos, family photos, not only for the individual but for the community as a whole.

Excellent well, we're running short on time. I've got one last question. So, Jim, you know, what are your overall thoughts now that you've had iN2L for a year, and how it's helped Sitter & Barfoot and your veterans?

Jim Darragh: I think we've touched on a lot of those issues, and some that we may have missed like the, you know, the walking tours or visiting places where people might have served, and that is not only an individual activity, but often is a group activity where there's more than one resident there, and they may have experienced the same duty station or the same location where they visited during the military career. So, I think it brings in, you know, that resonating to resident and experience.

So we're really excited about it here. I think we're just, you know, learning every day. And Valerie's given you some great examples on how this technology can help us hit the target when it comes to this integrated entertainment and engagement. We use it in our activities room all the time, for you know events where they're doing, you know, Italian day, and our culinary department will bring in some food, it's all, you know, done up in an Italian sort of setting, and then they'll have, you know, something on the iN2L that, you know, a walking tour of Italy, or you know, the recipe for the some of the food that's up there. Those kinds of things, I think just enable us to continue to you know, not only provide entertainment in a more enhanced way than we typically would have been able to do it. But also, that engagement piece that I talked about early on, I think, is so important. And we, you know, we're gonna continue to push the envelope and learn and take advantage of this system for sure.

Paige Mantel: Yeah. Well, I, you know, for having the system for a year, I think you have demonstrated amazing use of getting the value out of the technology, not only for your residents, but also helping your staff be more efficient, right? Not having to run to the activity room to get more materials but being able to stay in the room and just change the content. And really, you know, be able to focus on the residents. So great examples, great best practices that you've shared today.

I wanna thank you both so much for your time. And also, thanks to all of our participants that joined us today. Our next webinar will be on June 5th with another Communities That Shine Winner, New Cassel Retirement Center. I hope you join us for that, and for those of you that are interested in learning more about the LifeLoop and iN2L products, please let us know by answering the short survey that you'll see when you exit this webinar. Our team will be happy to follow up and schedule a personalized demo for you and your team.

So thank you, Jim and Valerie, again, really appreciate your time today, and thanks to everybody, have a wonderful day.

Jim Darragh: Thank you.

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