Salem Home

SALEM HOME community relationships, the Foundation has been able to continuously impact the lives of those living at the home. Sherry Janzen, Salem Home CEO, shares, “We had one local business celebrate their 50th anniversary by building a dining room for one of the care areas. We have changed the front entrance to automatic doors, making it user friendly, which was community funded as well. We have added the Abby Board – a giant interactive computer that looks like a radio, but comes with a steering wheel. When you touch the steering wheel, the car begins to drive along a country road, or to the beach. Two of the Care Areas have these and the Ladies Auxiliary is going to be working on the third one.” Identifying the needs of the residents is done through observation and evaluation of the environment and how they interact with it, using the QUIS-EH-O Evaluation Instrument. Janzen reports, “We had a storage room across from one of the care stations. The residents love to congregate where people are because that’s what residents living with dementia do; they like to be together with people. So, we knocked out the storage room and created a little sitting room. We are constantly doing things like that in our building as a result of what the evaluation shows us.” With a waitlist of 30, Salem Home was unable to admit anyone during the initial COVID-19 lockdown. For this reason, the facility eventually ended up with 20 empty beds. That led to a board decision to begin a multi-million dollar renovation to update the 60-bed Cottonwood Unit built in 1972. A three-phase project, each phase will update 20 beds, remove asbestos, add air conditioning, new furniture, draperies, high quality electric beds, and updated lifting systems. Fire suppression, a new air handling system, and the inclusion of air conditioning to the resident rooms is also part of the project, along with innovative navigation tools to assist those living with dementia.