Foster Senior Living Statement
It has been our passion, our dedication and our determination to treasure the elders in our lives that has guided us to where we stand today. What started out as a vision, over the years, has turned into much more than we could have ever imagined. This is our personal statement; this is our journey.
Our Role in Ozarks Health Care
Our role as a couple in Long Term Care began with a journey in 1982. John’s heritage had been established growing up in his fathers company of building and operating Long Term Care communities. By the time 1982 came around John already had 12 years of experience managing and building long-term care communities that housed seniors. I (Susan) provided the Registered Nurse clinical skills with a passion to serve seniors. I was driven with a desire to work and to perfect a program of quality from a clinical perspective. We had fallen in love with working together as a team and with a love for our elders that we served. We joined forces because of our deep desire to be the best provider of senior care. We started with a strong work ethic, and by simply challenging our personal skill sets to always provide a higher quality service. Before we both knew it, our role within the Ozarks had become a “personal journey” that reached our hearts and those we served.
Meeting the Needs of the Ozarks
As our roles within ourselves flourished, we found we were reaching out to meet the needs of elders across the Ozarks community as a whole. By constructing exceptional home like communities, training quality leadership and proactively nurturing our developed communities, we fostered nothing short of premier care. Our lives were individually dedicated, personally and professionally, to being on-call 24-hours each and every day of the year to answer questions, address concerns and be willing to present onsite for aid in any way. While this was a rigorous process within each community, it led us to ensuring excellence within our care to meet the needs of our elders. As we broadened within the Ozarks community and beyond, we ensured hands-on, individual assessments of our community with direct recommendations to those seniors, their families and our community leaders to ensure premier care. By providing a range of community options, including state licensure for skilled, assisted, residential and independent care communities, we promised quality care throughout varying levels as individually necessitated by our elders. Depending on the needs of a particular senior, we would pledge our devotion to the utmost individualized of care – including development of memory care units, incorporated rehabilitation assistance, wound care programs, pharmaceutical services, Joint Care Commission Certifications and home-health options throughout our communities within the Ozarks that included home based programs, skilled nursing/therapy services and Hospice programming.
Professional Motivation
Our professional motivation stems from our personal calling towards compassionate care of the elders within our community. Serving our seniors is our heritage and our individual devotions of our lives led us to where we stand to this day. While the senior may no longer be able to provide for themselves the essentials of daily grooming, nutrition, transportation, activity or medications, the seniors lives are the soul of our communities – for that we are grateful and have personally devoted our lives to serving them. With this personal devotion came professional motivation to provide a warm home like community, not simply to aid in those activities of daily life, but further to spiritually serve the needs and desires of our elders and their families.
Championed Care in our Field
Over the years we learned that championing care in our field necessitated quality leaders and quality care. “Our family takes care of your family” has been our motto in providing premier long-term care for decades. But, this quality care must start with our own team development, our own long-term care family. By hand-picking individuals to share in the values of our premier care, we learned to identify excellence in others and foster that excellence to the utmost of our abilities with attentive training and nurturing of these individuals into their own passions for servant-hood. With these rigorous processes of team development came resultant championed community leaders with longevity, superiority and loving devotion to care for our elders as we had long-desired.
Proudest Accomplishments
What originally started as a dream in the hearts of two young servants grew exponentially into a regional reality that has reached seniors in 24 communities, and across three states. Of all the years John and I have dedicated to long-term senior care, by far our proudest accomplishment was our journey – our journey of personal hands on servanthood, our journey of premier senior care, and our journey into the hearts and lives of our elders.