Thousands of sick, elderly West Virginians have been cared for at four state-owned nursing homes after private companies turned them away.
Last month, Gov. Patrick Morrisey announced the $60 million sale of the facilities.
The hospitals take poor patients with higher needs and employ hundreds of people.
The facilities — including John Manchin Sr. Health Care Center in Fairmont, Jackie Withrow Hospital in Beckley, Hopemont Hospital in Terra Alta in Preston County and Lakin Hospital in West Columbia in Mason County — will be sold to a private company, Marx Development Group.
Majestic Care, a subsidiary of Marx Development Group, will operate the nursing homes, which include 511 beds.
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In response to an Aug. 19 request, an attorney for the governor’s office said it would take until Sept. 26 to provide the purchase agreement. The sale is supposed to be finalized Sept. 30.
Majestic Care CEO Paul Pruitt spoke more broadly to his company’s goals for the facilities, saying lawyers would be better prepared to speak to contractual agreements and “not everything is fully signed yet.”
Here’s what Pruitt said about the company’s plans for patients, employees and the buildings.
(This interview has been edited for clarity and length.)
Will you stop accepting poor people with serious behavioral problems and disabilities?
Pruitt: No. Each facility sets policies for what they can and can’t take care of, which is the right thing to do, because they should never take a patient that they don’t believe that their clinical staff can handle. We have facilities throughout our organization that are specifically focused on behaviors, and I can tell you they run very well, and they’re actually rated very highly in the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services rating system.
To me, the biggest thing that we have to focus on is, we look at the population in that community, we look and see what their diagnoses (are), what’s medically going on with them, and we make sure we have the programming and clinical staff with education and training in place before we bring those patients into the building.
92% of our population is Medicaid. That is not an area that we shy away from at all.
How did you plan to recruit and retain quality nurses and other staff?
Pruitt: We’ll work on training and educating and developing skill sets.
We’re always looking at our compensation. So for example, if we go into an area, and the industry average is $20 but we’re paying $16, we’re going to make a change in our rates.
We’re always looking at our insurance benefits to see what we can do to really give them a good, strong package. We have a 401(k) plan that we offer to our staff.
If an employee is falling on hard times, and let’s say they can’t get their car fixed, they can submit an application that goes through a committee. They review it, and if everything looks right and looks like, ‘yes, this is a need,’ then my role is I sign the check, and we give them up to $1,500 to take care of whatever they need.
We won’t decrease pay.
Do you plan to retain the same number of nurses and staff?
Pruitt: Our goal is to retain the staff. We have to make sure we have all their legal paperwork, their application and their license on our files, but there’s no process they have to go through. They just are basically uploaded in our system, and they’re employees of Majestic.
If you have a high population where your medical management is not as high, but your activities of daily living require a lot of assistance, you might have a higher ratio of nurse aides than nurses, because we don’t need as high of a level of nurses, if the residents need more bathing, dressing, feeding, assistance and so on.
So you do have to look at the design of your population to really understand what the mix of your staffing should look like. Now, you still have to have nurses and you still have to have aides. It’s just what does that look like at the end of the day?
Are there minimum timeline and location requirements for rebuilds?
Pruitt: Our goal is to take the roughly 511 beds, and our goal is to redesign and rebuild facilities to accommodate those. If you take and divide three into 511, do we build those size buildings, or do we say, actually, we’re going build five because we’re going to build 100 bed buildings?
Where? What does it look like? That we have to figure out.
Jackie Withrow and Hopemont, those two have outlived their lives.
I would say our goal is to do as many rebuilds as we can possibly do.
If a family says, “hey, we love it here.” That’s great, they will stay there. They’ll stay there all the way through the build process. It’s going to take a few years to see anything come to fruition, and once it’s done, the residents will move to the new building.
I don’t know if there’s a minimum (time requirement). What we’re doing is we’re meeting with architects, and we’re working very diligently on facility design. We had to figure out how many buildings we need, how big we’re going to build and how much property we need. I forgot how hilly and windy West Virginia is.
I don’t think there’s any (location) requirements. But our goal is to keep people as close to their homes as possible.
How do you work to decrease the likelihood of abuse and neglect at your facilities?
Pruitt: We obviously follow our policy and procedures. We always do background checks. We also run everybody through a data bank to make sure that nothing’s been flagged on somebody’s license on hire. We do education and training on our abuse policy on hire and throughout the year. We do a massive training annually. I do have a corporate compliance officer who has done compliance for about 25 years. We have a compliance hotline that’s monitored. We have an anonymous online form. We remove all barriers so people have a voice and they can bring anything forward and any concern that we will investigate.
That is something that neither I, nor any of my executives, nor anybody the culture or company would allow, is abuse.
People bring their lives into work. In a lot of our lives, we have all these other external pressures, and we try to make sure we’re removing those stress levels.
As leaders, you are always watching for signs of possible burnout. That’s why we’re trying to ask how we can bring a higher quality of resources to our care team members.