West Otago Health LTD

People in the community love to be involved at Ribbonwood. According to McHutchon, “Even now we rely on volunteers and we have a lot of support from them. Every day a volunteer comes in and reads the newspaper to the residents, others provide activities and entertainment, and they supply Meals on Wheels to the community through us, as well.” In total, West Otago Health employs about 30 staff – 20 of those are at Ribbonwood. Being a small town with a population of only about 2300, they are one of the bigger employers in West Otago and the facility has been a draw card for people moving to the community. Future expansion of the facility is a definite possibility. In fact, it’s already been planned. As Body reports, “The site we’re on is quite large and when we designed the building we got the same architect, Peter Porteous of Oakley Gray Architects in Dunedin, to do a 25-year plan for expansion. When we tendered out the design and build, instead of getting an architect to draw a plan and then tender out the build, we called for Expressions of Interest from syndicates of architects and builders together. We encouraged them to team up and we ended up with four different designs and costings submitted for the building. And it wasn’t for nothing, we paid them $3000 each for their time. From that process, we selected the final architect and builder, which was Oakley Gray and Cooke Bros. Construction, and they were excellent to deal with. The beauty of putting a builder and architect together is they tend to moderate each other.” Looking ahead, there is also potential for dementia care at the facility. However McHutchon cautions, “Adding dementia care is a bit tricky because of the level of security you need and the gates and doors. It would be great but there is already an abundance of beds in the southern region that aren’t sold for the higher level of dementia care, so the demand isn’t there at the moment. But in the future there is potential for the low level dementia care. In the whole time we’ve been operating, we’ve only had to transfer one person out to another facility for dementia care because their behaviour was too challenging for us. We try to keep them as long as possible, mostly for their whole life, unless they become a danger to themselves or others.” Five days a week, the medical centre hosts a medical practise with a GP and a nurse practitioner. And an after hours clinic is provided by trained nurses and a doctor. The site also has a large triage facility with a helicopter pad, so air retrievals are done from there as well. “For a small community in a rural location, we have a huge amount of top-class facilities,” says McHutchon. “And with an aging population, people are staying in their homes longer and the need for community facilities is just going to increase. In the future, rural communities will take on more services such as skin clinics and respiratory clinics. Why take a four-hour round trip to Dunedin Hospital to see a specialist for 15 minutes, when we can set up a video conference unit here and have the GP sit in on Ph (03) 477 9147 www.oakleygray.co.nz Oakley Gray Architects are Aged Care and Healthcare specialists. Professional and personable, we have designed facilities totalling over 1000 bed spaces in the last 20 years. WEST OTAGO HEALTH LTD (R I BBONWOOD COUNTRY HOME)