Here at Episcopal Retirement Services (ERS), we take our residents’ safety, security and quality of life very seriously.

We continuously train our team members and consistently reinforce that training. We proactively maintain our properties. Most importantly, we take a person-centered approach to rendering elder care.

Those characteristics have made us one of the Cincinnati area’s premier senior care providers. And, now, they’ve given us additional cause to celebrate.

ERS’s Marjorie P. Lee (MPL) and Deupree House retirement communities received high marks on their annual Commission on Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities (CARF) inspections.

What is CARF and why is accreditation from it so important?

CARF is an internationally-recognized authority on safety and efficacy of care in short-term physical rehabilitation, skilled nursing, behavioral health and substance abuse treatment facilities, as well as in Continuing Care Retirement Communities (CCRCs) like Deupree and MPL.

Since its founding in 1966, CARF’s accreditation program has become a retirement care industry standard.

Providers seeking its accreditation request an on-site survey from practitioners selected by CARF. During the survey, providers must demonstrate that they’ve conformed to CARF’s rigorous standards.

Based on the results of the survey, the organization prepares a written report of the provider’s strengths and areas for improvement. If a provider has sufficiently demonstrated its conformance to the standards, it earns CARF accreditation.

Our 2017 inspection results

Over the past year, we worked diligently to compile many binders full of evidence of our compliance with CARF’s standards.

After they arrived, the surveyors interviewed residents, staff, family members and other partners to verify that our self-reported evidence matched the care we were actually providing in our communities.

Their remarks were highly complimentary. They specifically observed:

• Person-centered care approaches work, and ERS’s efforts to become a retirement care industry leader in providing person-centered care are bearing obvious fruit. Our residents are happy and living well. They expressed uncommon senses of purpose and fulfillment to the surveyors.
• That we’ve made person-centered care an ingrained part of our organizational culture was evident in all the inspectors’ interactions with ERS team members.
• Our dementia care services, including our incorporation of A Positive Approach to Care training and our suite of memory support services are, in one surveyor’s words, “outstanding.”
• Our safety culture is robust. The surveyors were impressed by our efforts to include our residents in generating that culture of safety. At Deupree House, for example, they were particularly intrigued by the fact that one of our residents, who had career experience in fire safety, was assisting the community as a safety check volunteer.
• The surveyors noted that our staff morale is excellent and that we enjoy lower-than-average turnover, relative to our industry peers — both reasons that we’ve received recognition as one of Cincinnati’s Top Workplaces for eight years running.
• They also noted that our communities’ pristine landscapes, the excellent upkeep of our buildings, our culinary services, lifestyle programs and our transportation services were all highly desirable strengths.

Those were just some of the positive comments we received from our surveyors.

CARF’s accreditation process has provided us an excellent framework for ensuring that we’re providing the very best care to our elders.  We’re a better organization for having gone through it, because the self-assessments and inspections that it requires have allowed us to grow and improve in unforeseen ways.

When you’re choosing a retirement care provider for yourself or your loved one, look for one that meets CARF’s standards. We can vouch: they’re rigorous, and they absolutely help to document that a provider is rendering safe, effective care.

As a freshly re-accredited organization, we’d love a chance to show you how those standards apply at Deupree House and Marjorie P. Lee.