Elite Care at Fanno Creek

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Elite Care was referred by Caring.com and by far was the best one. It was more like a home. They have 24 rooms in a house in two halves of the facility, so there’s a total of 48 rooms. The rooms are OK. The way they approach care is different. Everybody eats their meals together, and the chef cooks in front of you. You can talk to the chef, it’s all open, and the rooms kind of feed into the dining/living room area. No matter what stage the Alzheimer’s spouse is, the other one stays with him. The grounds are much more user friendly, they’ve got chicken around, and they have a huge garden. I think it was very different from the ones I’ve been to.

A Gerontologist

Fanno Creek, like its sister facility in Milwaukie called Oatfield Estates, has an interesting story. The owners were quite the darlings of the person-center care movement, which was strong in Oregon about five years ago. The couple"”Bill Reed and Lydia Lundberg, were looking to find a place for a parent, so they built their own facility"”with the goal of creating the kind of place they would like to live in themselves. They also created a technology that would allow family members to get updates and status reports online from anywhere in the country, even checking their whereabouts and activities and vital signs. As part of this electronic monitoring, a bell is activated when a resident tries to leave or rings a call button"”and there's also a record of how people responded and how long it took. Actually, very few people do it, but it does give some people peace of mind. The owners are also very interested in green and sustainable"”all the facilities are LEED-certified. The care concept is like roquefort dressing: people love it or hate it; there is no in between. The ones who are unhappy with the care feel that the staff isn't adequately trained in memory care, that the facility is understaffed and not well maintained. The idea was to give a high level of attention to people with memory care issues and improve the quality of their lives to extend them. But the facility is not licensed as memory care facility"”only as a residential care facility, which means it doesn't need to comply with some of the more stringent staffing and building safety requirements. Fanno Creek is the second facility Reed and Lundberg built, and it is also not licensed for memory care. It includes the electronic monitoring, but only two houses, with one central kitchen. To be green, they have installed Astroturf on the grounds to conserve water instead of groundcover or grass, but the look ad feel of that is offputting to some. The construction is funky"”which is not in keeping with the high cost. The food is good and mostly organic and fresh"”and effort is put into it. The staff does a nice job with the residents and tries to find out who they are and what would work for them. But the staffing seems light, given the care needs of the residents. With Fanno Creek, there is a feeling that the owners are resting on their laurels, but have not adjusted to what works and what hasn't"”and they haven't evolved.