Simpson Memorial Home has between 30 and 35 residents in their nursing home but could have up to 55 residents if they had more nurses on staff.
Melissa Hazelwood is the Director of Nursing there. She said Simpson Memorial Home is a great place to start your nursing career because of the home like atmosphere they have there.
“We do resident center care so we try to make the residents come first in all aspects,” she said. “In there needs, their wants because we know at this stage in the game what else do they have than what we can provide (for them).”
Hazelwood graduated from Eastern Iowa Community College in 2005 from the nursing program at Eastern Iowa Community College as a registered nurse. This is her eighteenth year in nursing.
She decided to go into the nursing field because she enjoys helping people.
“I feel like it gives me the opportunity to help people in a way that I don’t have to expect anything back so the reward is the good health and the happiness of the residents,” Hazelwood said.
Services supervisor Clifford McFerren said currently they have one full-time floor nurse and three full-time management nurses that also work the floor to help cover nursing shifts.
“We use agency nurses,” McFerren added. “We’ve got two long term contracts so it’s the same nurse.”
There are also two part-time nurses that pick up shifts when needed, he added.
Simpson Memorial Home would need three more nurses full-time to be fully staffed. A registered nurse (RN) to work an eight-hour shift overnight and licensed practicing nurses (LPN) during the day.
Since the pandemic, staffing McFerren has seen the need for nurses increase making it hard to draw nurses to work there.
“Since we came out of COVID, we’ve noticed a lot of other facilities starting to pay exorbitant amounts of money for RN’s and LPN’s,” McFerren said. “Paying almost what an agency rate would be so a lot of these nurses went off to agencies to get more money and floating around or went to other facilities that were paying $60 to $70 an hour when normally it’s $30 to $40 an hour.”
Simpson Memorial Home is a non-profit agency that couldn’t compete with the agency rates, he added. They pay between $30 and $40 an hour depending on experience.
To keep morale up amongst the staff, extra paid time off is given for hours worked and meals are provided from time to time.
“We’ll do just fun crazy stuff that’s just a little off the wall that takes their mind off of things,” McFerren said. “Hopefully, it’s received well. They seem to like it. Another thing is you count on your time for the impact as for what needs to be done. You listen to them and implement some of their ideas that by far is a better morale booster than anything else.”
Simpson Memorial Home doesn’t make any profit from having the nursing home, McFerren said. The money collected goes directly back to paying wages and the upkeep of the facilities. It is ran by a volunteer board that oversees this facility and the one in Wilton. There aren’t too many non-profit nursing agencies left in the state.