Anyone involved in residential care for the elderly knows that wellness makes life easier for everyone involved. Residents with greater health concerns need more attention from your staff and more intervention from outside caregivers, like their doctor. In short, the healthier you can keep your residents, the easier it is to run a successful, problem-free Residential Care Facility for the Elderly (RCFE).
As a result, some facilities have started to implement wellness programs. Your program could blend a schedule of on-site physical activities like yoga and tai chi with nutrition education and mental health screenings, for example. You can tailor your offering to your facility and your residents. In any case, taking steps to offer your residents wellness tools can support your facility — and even lower your insurance costs.
Let’s look at some of the biggest benefits of a wellness program for RCFEs.
Improving Physical Wellness
A program that residents can participate in encourages them to think about their health. Maybe you remind them of the importance of fresh produce with nutrition education or you make it easy to get moving with a weekly yoga class.
However you choose to activate a wellness program, doing so — and advertising at your facility about it — helps to keep physical wellbeing top of mind for your residents. And at the same time, it offers them tools to work toward their own wellness goals.
Making Social Connections
A wellness program doesn’t just boost physical health. It can also support other wellness factors, helping your residents thrive.
Specifically, strong social connections play a big role in healthy aging. It can be hard for residents to make friends, though. With a wellness program, you offer them the opportunity to connect on something they all have in common: their health.
Coming to a regularly hosted tai chi class helps residents get familiar with one another’s faces, for example. This can help them feel more comfortable around each other. And if you train your staff to look for opportunities to help residents connect, that tai chi instructor could even facilitate those first stages of friendship.
The Impact on Your Insurance Claims
Healthier, better connected residents help your facility thrive. Their wellness means fewer issues for your staff to handle. This allows your team to focus on further bolstering wellbeing. It’s a circle that can yield serious upside over the years.
And the benefits extend to your bottom line, too. Obviously, healthier residents means fewer serious medical needs at your facility. It also helps to lower the risk of serious chronic conditions — or at least enable doctors to catch them earlier, when they’ll be easier for your team to manage.
On top of that, wellness programs can reduce your liability exposure. Residents who go to yoga regularly are less likely to fall, for example. This directly reduces your risk of being taken to court by their family if they suspect the fall was due to negligence on your part.
This lowered risk can, in turn, lower the premiums on your liability insurance coverage.
Ultimately, a wellness program can serve up a number of benefits for your facility. To explore where they could yield cost-savings on your insurance policies, call our team at (805) 413-5668.
