RainbowVision downplays critical state report.
Ah, the assisted life.
At RainbowVision, Santa Fe's grounbreaking gay-friendly "community for your second 50 years," the second floor of the main building is devoted to older residents who need a little help getting by, day to day. Whether that's help managing medications or aid in slicing up fancy cheeses, the staff of 15***image1*** employees provide adult caregiving services in a venue that's less like a hospice and nearly indiscernible from a resort hotel.
But even in the lap of four-star luxury, between tulip-arranging seminars and chair-based yoga lessons, residents and New Mexico Department of Health inspectors still find room to criticize.
A recently released annual inspection by the DOH Division of Health Improvement identified nine "grounds for revocation" of RainbowVision's adult residential-care license. Based on information collected in mid- and late-March, health officials noted deficiencies such as "failure to ensure availability of snacks" and "failure to ensure functional tub for resident bathing preference." DOH also noted vagaries in RainbowVision's residence agreements and discrepancies between advertised services and what is actually offered.
What jumps from the 29-page evaluation, however, is repeated shortcomings in terms of safety training records and a confrontation in which DOH suspected RainbowVision administrators of falsifying documents.
Senior Vice President Joyce Begosian and General Manager Geno Koehler met with SFR in RainbowVision's first-floor conference room, which, they point out, is open to the gay retirement community's activist groups. They say DOH's findings look worse than they are.
"You have to understand, we're new," Bogosian says. "I'm from this industry and no one is perfect. [Inspectors] come in and say, 'Hey, these are areas you need to improve,' and it's very normal."
The assisted-living unit opened in July 2006, a month before the larger independent-living community opened. It includes 26 rooms, each capable of housing two residents, though it is currently only at 60 percent capacity.
RainbowVision submitted a "plan of correction" that was accepted by DOH, which inspected the facility a second time last week. As of deadline, the results of the second survey were not yet public.
Through a tour of the facility, SFR confirmed that snacks were indeed available, including such delicacies as pineapple dip and brie, and were presented clearly in the weekly menu posted along the units' main corridor. ***image2***The high-tech bathtub that a confidential resident complained had been out of service since January 2008 seemed fully functional, although Koehler rejected SFR's request to video the contraption in action.
Koehler and Bogosian would not allow SFR to approach residents in the closed unit.
Administrators acknowledge problems with the fire-drill records. DOH charges them with "failing to ensure" that the records were not falsifications. According to the inspector's log, a confidential group of employees told DOH that they had been called together in early March to sign fire-drill documents that were then, allegedly, backdated for January and February.
In both their correction plan and in an interview with SFR, Bogosian and Koehler explain that while the documents do give the "impression of falsification," it was actually an honest accident. Koehler says that documents were for training purposes only and had accidentally been placed in the review folder.
"We'll admit it-it didn't look good," Koehler says. "But it was unintentional… They don't tell you when they're coming. They just showed up. So I called [the director] and said, 'Bring your folder up.' And he just grabbed it without looking."
RainbowVision officials, however, did admit to the DOH that fire drills had not been conducted on the assisted living unit between November and March.
Koehler and Bogosian maintain that most of the problems were procedural documentation errors that aren't likely to reoccur. In the meantime, they're eager for the feedback, especially since the company plans to open new facilities in California and Canada.
"We're still in kind of the start-up stages, although I think we're doing extremely well in how well-organized we are," Koehler says. "The input they gave us from this last survey was very valuable…[Next time] we'll be able to collect our information in a way that the state says, 'Yeah, this is the way we'd like to see it.'"
