Caring no burden for this administrator

One of Mary Beth Daigneault’s first memories of a nursing home consists of her elderly grandmother setting off the fire alarm with her contraband toaster while attempting to cook pork chops. Daigneault, then about 12, thought the whole incident rather amusing.
About 27 years later, Daigneault holds hundreds of nursing home memories after 17 years in the business, including the last 14 as administrator of the St. Clare Home. As administrator, Daigneault oversees about 65 employees, a $3.5 million operating budget, admissions, marketing and medical-supply billing. But the most important part of her job, she says, is ensuring the comfort of the home’s 47 residents. And while nursing homes often get a bad rap from a public that envisions cold, institutional buildings devoid of life, Daigneault sees just the opposite.
“There are a lot of people that are doing a lot of living here,” she said from her office across the hall from a resident room. “They’re having fun with their peers. They’re developing new relationships with a new generation – the people [who] are caring for them.”
For Daigneault, her job is all about relationships. As head of admissions, she receives calls from families looking to place relatives at the home in downtown Newport. She greets every new resident personally and regularly walks the halls. She frequently provides hugs.
Daigneault is also a good listener. She spends hours hearing stories from residents with decades of living behind them. From the mundane to the life-altering, Daigneault soaks up the conversations like water to a sponge.
“[I enjoy] the stories about them bringing up their families and working and the work ethic that they had,” Daigneaut said. She also enjoys “their commitment to their families.”
Good listening also translates to good management. Daigneault listens closely to families listing a litany of instructions for how to care for their relatives. She also pays close attention to the residents themselves. Once a resident’s relative told the St. Clare staff not to feed the resident meat because she did not like it. The staff diligently obliged until one day the resident caught a whiff of, of all things, pork chops.
“She said to the staff, ‘All I want is a pork chop, can’t I just have a pork chop?’ ” Daigneault recalled. “So we got her a pork chop and we told the family if she wants a pork chop we’re going to give her one.”
Daigneault said it is the little joys like satisfying a pork chop craving that keep her returning to work every day. And although she spends a lot of time at a desk, she is not chained to it. A typical day could see her admitting a resident one minute and showing the plumber a broken boiler the next.
She also attempts to steer the nursing home through a rapidly evolving funding environment. To compete, St. Clare is seeking city approvals to build an addition that will add assisted living to the home and expand the number of traditional nursing beds.
Daigneault said she is acutely aware of the fact that decisions she and administrators like her make cause a direct impact on people’s lives.
“These people are not just waiting at a window to receive an ice cream cone or a widget. They are waiting to be assisted … dressing, eating [and] living. So if we don’t have enough staff on, it affects them,” she said. “There’s nothing worse than someone who is hungry and can’t feed themselves [waiting to] be fed; or [needing] to use the restroom and having to wait.”
Daigneault became responsible for fulfilling such needs almost by accident. She spent the summer before her senior year at the University of Rhode Island visiting her mother in California. There, Daigneault ended up taking care of an elderly cousin. “Her stories were fabulous,” she said. “She was a wealth of wisdom, and I really just loved sitting and talking with her. … So I started thinking about working with the elderly.”
Daigneault returned to URI in the fall of 1991 and nine months later left holding a bachelor’s degree in human-development consulting and family studies, with a minor in gerontology.
At a job fair in 1992 she found an opening at Oakland Grove Health Care Center in Woonsocket for a part-time social worker. The center hired her in 1992 and she quickly moved up the ranks, becoming a full-time social worker and then the admissions and marketing coordinator. During an evaluation the center’s administrator asked Daigneault where she saw herself in five years.
“I foolishly said, ‘I want a job like yours,’ really at that point having no idea what that entailed,” Daigneault said.
Nonetheless, her boss sent her to licensing school. When Daigneault’s boss learned of a part-time assistant administrator position opening up at the St. Clare Home, she told Daigneault. The newly licensed administrator started the day after Christmas in 1995.
“I realized … the responsibility of taking care of all the people who live in this kind of environment and work in this kind of environment,” Daigneault said. “Trying to make sure you are doing the right thing by them all the time, it’s a big responsibility.”
Daigneault spent three years as assistant administrator learning the ropes. When her boss left, she applied for the job and was hired. Now, as administrator, she sometimes thinks of her grandmother just wanting a pork chop all those years before. And while St. Clare’s prohibits toasters in residence rooms, Daigneault keeps a few pork chops on hand, lest a resident take matters into his own hands and set off the fire alarm. •