Majestic Care: Called to Care

A straightforward approach to complex needs defines the Majestic Care mission

It takes a village to raise a child. When that child is grown, matures, and bears the lines, folds, and wrinkles of a life lived, it takes a community to care for them.

It is precisely that communal gathering of human beings, united in their desire to support and care for one another, that informs the work of Majestic Care. The Indiana-based acute care provider offers a range of post-acute healthcare services designed to promote the best possible quality of life for the people they serve.

CEO Bernie McGuinness drives that worldview from his own experience. He began his healthcare career as a certified nursing assistant, and his intimate knowledge of the amount of energy, responsibility, and selflessness that it takes to care for our elders informs the entire Majestic Care organization.

At present, that organization cares for roughly 450 individuals throughout Indiana and the Midwest. “Sometimes we're the only post-acute care providers in a county, so we are a big piece of that continuum of care,” he explained. “The majority of our residents are geriatric, but we're also seeing more and more residents in their late forties and fifties that are needing rehab services. We're seeing an increase in memory care demand, throughout our properties, and we’re able to offer different memory care services and short-term rehabilitation services.”

Majestic Care is developing clinical niches to meet the demands of residents with respiratory care and cardiac care needs as well. “We're trying to make sure that we meet the needs of our local communities and not going with a cookie cutter approach of ‘here are the programs we offer.’ We solicit feedback from our hospital partners and make sure that we're meeting the needs of the local communities through different clinical programs,” he added.

McGuinness has worked through decades of change in the post-acute care space. “The number one thing I've seen is the type of resident we see discharged from the local hospital, and the increase in the level of acuity that our residents have,” he observed.  “They're having shorter and shorter lengths of stay in the hospital so they come to us with much more complex acuity, medication needs, IV antibiotics, and wound care. That's really impacted our business and impacted our industry.”

In the last decade, he noted, it’s become essential for post-acute providers to increase their clinical capabilities.

A Fresh Take on Elder Care

“Some of the most exciting areas in post-acute care is that focus on clinical capabilities,” McGuinness continued, adding that the improvement in overall quality that results from the increased emphasis on clinical care is reshaping the industry as a whole.

“As an industry we've all upped our game, so to speak, to really meet those demands. In return we are producing some really quality outcomes, whether it's from our therapy department or from wound care and infection control. As an industry we've made a lot of advances, particularly in creating partnerships with our vendors.”

One particularly novel partnership exists between Majestic Care and MedScript, a startup pharmacy that caters specifically to the needs of long-term care facilities. In each Majestic facility, MedScript is installing freestanding “vending machines” that contain 99 percent of the medications found in local hospitals’ formularies. The partnership, said McGuinness, will slash the amount of time nurses spend on medication delivery by 20 to 30 percent.

“It gets that nurse away from passing out medications and back to the bedside so they can assess a resident’s needs, enabling us to catch any early changes in their condition, or just allowing the nurses and caregivers the time to sit down with the resident and hold their hand and comfort them if they're having a bad day.”

Having on-demand access to medications adds a level of flexibility and convenience virtually unheard of in the traditional nursing home space. “It allows us to focus on volume-based purchasing, eliminating waste, controlling our costs of medication, as well as helping us to put a real control on narcotics and controlled substances,” McGuinness stated.

“It's something that's unique to our industry and we think it will set us apart from our competitors,” he went on. “When an admission comes in at eight at night, in the traditional model, the pharmacy would order the medication and it might arrive around one or two in the morning. Now we'll have that medication on site. No one will have to wait for their pain meds or for their first dose of antibiotics. Those things will be in our facilities whether you’re in a big city or in a rural setting.”

Caring for Those Who Care

Anchoring Majestic Care’s service provision is a philosophy that begins with caring for the caregivers, and that’s another significant difference in today’s senior care industry. “One of our first missions as an operating company is focusing on what we can do systemically as an organization to help our different communities attract and retain the best talent in the market,” he stressed.

Take the decision to pay workers weekly, instead of the bi-weekly routine preferred by most healthcare organizations. “So many of our care team members live paycheck-to-paycheck, week to week, and if we can ease the stress of their outside burdens when they are in our community we believe they can provide better care.”

In addition to offering a 401K, long- and short-term disability insurance and an EAP, McGuinness said, “As a startup company, we took the burden upon ourselves to reduce the cost for our care team members to have health insurance. If we want to have health insurance for a single mother raising a few children, how do we make that affordable? So once again they don't have that worry, and they can focus on the residents that we have the honor to serve every day.”

The company offers online learning and continuing education programs for their care team members and makes an effort to nurture lifelong careers in elder care.The way Majestic Care supports their team members combines the simple and sweet with a real understanding of what it takes to step forward with an open heart to care for others.

“Just thanking them for their time, recognizing their birthdays, we really focus on simple things,” McGuinness admits. “Without our frontline care team members, there is no Majestic Care.”