“We took over the Absolut portfolio out of Chapter 11 in March 2020 … if you remember the timeline, the world shut down on March 15.”

These are the words of Jason Newman, the chief marketing officer for the Living Legends portfolio of nursing homes, which in addition to the six Absolut locations includes The McGuire Group, Taconic Health Care and VestraCare facilities.

In total, the portfolio includes 19 locations serving more than 2,800 residents and patients throughout the state of New York. This scale has been achieved through a recent period of growth and transformation.

In 2016, McGuire Group sold a 20% stake in the business to VestraCare, with VestraCare’s Edward Farbenblum becoming an officer and director. In 2018, Farbenblum expanded his ownership stake as two McGuire family members sold their shares in the business. Then administrative consultive services got underway for the Absolut buildings just as the pandemic hit in 2020, and for the Taconic properties after that. Farbenblum and his wife became sole owners of McGuire Group in 2021, and that year also saw the appointment of Susan Grigg as CEO for the portfolio.

As demonstrated most dramatically by the timing of the Absolut portfolio deal, this growth has occurred during “interesting times,” Newman told Skilled Nursing News in an interview at Zimmet Healthcare Services Group’s recent conference in Connecticut.

For all the difficulties involved with growing during the Covid-19, the pandemic also gave leadership “a real, incredible vision into the needs of the facilities and our residents,” leading to initiatives such as the launch of a People Experience Team to ensure daily staff engagement, and inspiring the creation of the “Living Legends” concept as an umbrella to unite the brands within the portfolio.

“We wanted to turn it into a culture, so it wasn’t something that just became a marketing brand or logo … it was something that was really formed out of passion for coming out of probably one of the most challenging times in our history,” Newman said of the Living Legends concept.

Confidence in census, a focus on staffing

As the height of the pandemic passed, Farbenblum and the other leaders of the newly expanded portfolio were confident that census would eventually recover — but they also recognized that unless recruitment and retention improved, they would not have adequate staffing levels to support higher occupancy levels.

They needed to shift their strategy from “aggressively being marketers for patients” and build a brand identity that would attract both patients and workers, Newman said. This was the genesis for the Living Legends concept.

Nursing home workers proved that they are legends during the pandemic by going into buildings day after day to deliver care despite all the uncertainties and risks, Newman said. Residents also are “living legends,” insofar as each of them has a story to share and some sort of adversity that they have endured, which has led them to being in rehab or long-term care.

Even as this unified branding principle has been put in place, the portfolio still consists of distinct entities. In part this is due to the vagaries of ownership structures and timing of official transitions, and in part this is to leverage the “independent personalities” of all the legacy companies involved. For example, The McGuire Group has been a leader in the western New York market for about three decades, and a consistently high performer on various performance metrics. Today, the facilities have an average overall 5-Star rating of 4.2 stars.

Still, the Living Legends moniker creates a unifying identity and an entry point for talking about the company’s culture with applicants, according to Newman.

“We wanted to do something that made the applicants familiar with us on a larger scale,” he said. “You may see [four] different names on a tablecloth, so to speak, at a job fair. But those people that work for us represent our concept of living legends.”

As for how the Living Legends culture is created and perpetuated on an operational level, the company’s People Experience Team is a driving force. That team is led by Chief Experience Officer Patrick McFeely. He formerly was the administrator at the McGuire Group’s 184-bed Garden Gate Health Care Facility.

“His engagement with his staff was really something that the new leadership of our company really found to be impressive and important,” Newman said. “So we took him out of his role as administrator and replaced him with his director of nursing, who moved up the ladder.”

McFeely has a team at the corporate office, and they have teams dispersed throughout the portfolio at the facility-level to train on the Living Legends culture. One important facet of that culture — career development and internal advancement — was demonstrated by McFeely’s own promotion and the elevation of his former DON.

Indeed, education and career advancement is prominently highlighted in a video on the recruitment page of the Living Legends website. The video features the message “We Pay You to Learn” written in graffiti on a wall, and shows someone in scrubs literally climbing a ladder, ascending from CNA to LPN to RN to director to administrator. The company offers paid CNA training as well as free tuition and reimbursement programs.

Like many other skilled nursing operators around the country, the Living Legends companies also have introduced a variety of other programs and benefits to help attract and retain staff. At Living Legends facilities, these include “Weekend Warrior” and 12-hour shifts, flexible scheduling, weekly paychecks, shift differentials and discount programs.

What’s next

Over the last few months, the company has “absolutely seen an increase” in recruitment and retention, Newman said — so much so that the Living Legends strategy now has shifted, with a greater focus on new clinical capabilities and programs to drive occupancy.

“We needed the staff to be able to bring the residents,” Newman said.

As one example of a new program, Absolut Care of Aurora Park recently launched a wound care program. Prior to Absolut’s bankruptcy and subsequent sale, the 320-bed facility received bad press for its quality of care and was carrying a one-star rating on Care Compare; that has since improved to two stars.

Another recent initiative is the introduction of technology from a company called Circadia, for contactless monitoring of residents to enable early detection of abnormalities indicating issues such as respiratory failure or cardiac events, enabling interventions to prevent exacerbations and events such as falls. The Living Legends facilities are the only SNFs in western New York with this technology, Newman said, adding that the tech should give hospitals the “ability and comfort” to discharge more clinically complex patients to the company’s buildings.

“One of the things that we really tried to do is — because we have such a large footprint, specifically in Western New York — really partner with area hospitals, to assess their needs … and how can we facilitate seamless transfers, but more than that, ensure continuity of care,” he said.

Further portfolio expansion also could occur, but Newman emphasized that the company only intends to scale up through “strategic, intelligent and fiscally responsible growth.” And having worked “extremely hard” to reduce employee burnout, increase recruitment, and restore “normal functioning” to facilities, a back-to-basics mindset is the order of the day.

“Our plan has always been: deliver good care,” Newman said. “We’ve always focused on appropriate staffing. We’ve always focused on good clinical outcomes. We’ve always put patient care before profits … That’s still our plan.”