Woodland Care Center Administrator Justin Settlemier stands in the courtyard of the assisted living facility. Recently, the center received a five-star rating by Medicare.gov, the official U.S. Government site for Medicare.
Woodland can claim to have five-star service when it comes to health care as the aptly-named Woodland Care Center recently received that rating from the federal authority on the industry.
Last month, the center announced it had received a five-star overall rating from Medicare.gov, the official U.S. Government site for Medicare. In order to get that rating, the facility was assessed on health inspection results, staffing levels and other quality measures benefitting patients, according to the Medicare.gov nursing home profile for the center.
Woodland Care Center Administrator Justin Settlemier said that although the facility has done well on assessments in the past, this was the first time the center received five stars overall. He was quick to cite the staff of the facility as the primary reason for its success, lauding the work of the center as a whole.
“It’s a team effort,” Woodland Care Center Community Relations Director Tammy Mackey said. “We’re small (for a center) and everybody works really close together … when something happens we all know about it, it’s important to all of us.”
“We are a team, that’s the biggest part of this … If one of us was gone we couldn’t have done it,” Settlemier added.
Settlemier is the grandson of the original owners, Gene and Caroline. The center has been family owned since the 1970s, he explained, with himself being in the administrator position for about two years as of now.
Although he wanted to be a nurse like his grandfather, Settlemier said that going into college he never thought he would end up back at the family business. It wasn’t until the death of his grandfather and the urging of his grandmother that he then made the decision to take on the leadership role at the center.
That focus on family is one of the major reasons both Settlemier and Mackey believe Woodland Care Center has had success.
“All of our staff knows our residents by name. We know their families; their families know us,” Mackey said.
“Some of our staff has been with us 20-some years, which is an oddity in this industry,” Mackey said. She explained that the family feel of the center along with its lack of a big corporate structure lended to people being willing to stick with it.
“It’s kind of nice where we are small enough we can manage things in our own way,” Settlemier said, explaining that in the case of a more corporate facility the bottom line would be more important than the care itself.
Originally just a nursing facility when purchased, the center received an assisted living expansion in the 1990s. One of the things that makes Woodland Care Center unique is that comprehensive nature of its care facilities, which apart from being both a nursing home and an assisted living facility, also has services for short-term rehabilitation and hospice care.
Mackey brought up how having multiple types of facilities means that patients and residents can transition in and out of each while still being in the same location with the same staff. Other than that aspect of care, Settlemier added that a holistic focus on the patient also sets Woodland Care Center apart.
“We care about all of the patient’s needs, not just their rehab needs — what are their social needs, what are their spiritual needs,” Settlemier said.
