Local home care services, hospice programs changing
Dickinson’s home care and hospice programs have moved out of the Catholic Health Initiatives-owned St. Joseph’s Hospital and some of their services will be dropped, said Amy Kreidt, director of home care and hospice.
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Dickinson’s home care and hospice programs have moved out of the Catholic Health Initiatives-owned St. Joseph’s Hospital and some of their services will be dropped, said Amy Kreidt, director of home care and hospice.
However, the 29 people who were using the discontinued services will continue to be served by independent providers, said Diane Mortenson, adult services supervisor at Stark County Social Services.
“Home health and hospice is not going away, but there are a few things, and very few things, that they are not going to be able to do,” said Dennis Cannon, St. Joseph’s spokesperson.
On July 1, the home assistance program will be eliminated, Kreidt said.
“It’s an unskilled service where it doesn’t have to have a nurse at all,” Kreidt said. “A CNA (certified nursing assistant) goes to help take care of a patient and bathe them or light house work, sometimes do grocery shopping, that type of thing.”
Stark County Social Services case manages elderly and disabled people in the area that need in-home care.
“We’re trying to keep them in their homes so they don’t have to go to the nursing homes or leave their communities,” Mortenson said. “We can never have enough qualified service providers.”
The six or seven CNAs who performed those services will continue to work full time for Catholic Health Initiatives, but will also work independently to provide home assistance, Kreidt said.
“What we did was meet with those individuals that were working for the agency and encouraged them to become individual qualified service providers,” Mortenson said. “We will be notifying our 29 clients that they were taking care of that St. Joseph’s Hospital is no longer a provider and we will be giving them the option to choose a new provider.”
Some who provided the services have already have been qualified, Mortenson said.
“If the other ones don’t get qualified, they just won’t be an option to those clients to pick them,” Mortenson said.
In addition to changes in programs, the home care and hospice program moved May 1 to Second Avenue West as a first step in splitting from St. Joseph’s Hospital.
To be more efficient, they will be operating independently from the hospital, but will still be owned by Catholic Health Initiatives, Kreidt said.
All of CHI’s home care and hospice programs in North Dakota, South Dakota and Minnesota will have the same governing body, Kreidt said.
“They’ve found it’s more economical if we all do the same thing and we only have one governing body instead of each hospital having their own,” Kreidt said.
She expects the split from St. Joseph’s to be completed in January.
“It’s about bringing better health care and more efficient health care to people in our area and being able to financially do that without losing money,” Cannon said. “If we don’t make money, we can’t keep our doors open.”
Cannon does not expect the changes to affect St. Joseph’s Hospital patients or staff.
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