Q&As - Rest Home

We are putting a lot of effort into designing the rest home area so it feels like home.  Golden Bay is lucky to have a homely feel to all of its health services, and that is largely to do with the people who run them.

The DHB cannot continue to provide a subsidy above the government-designated rate beyond 31 December 2009 and Joan Whiting cannot operate without additional funding.  Assuming the community supports an integrated facility, the parties will work towards keeping the Joan Whiting rest home operating until the residents can transfer to a new facility.  If we don’t go with an integrated facility then it will close and residents will need to find new homes.

The Friends want to keep Joan Whiting functioning on its current site.  For integration to work, so we can achieve the benefits of working together, we are looking at having a rest home as part of an integrated centre on one site in or near Takaka.  The Friends have made general suggestions to the Joan Whiting Memorial Trust but there are no funds available at this time.

The Joan Whiting trustees and manager have been working with the concept plan designer Andy Clark to ensure the rest home facilities will be comfortable and homely and a nice place to live.

We don’t have specific figures for that.  The whole point of integration is being able to spread some costs across the whole facility.  It is how we are able to make rest home care for that number of people viable for Golden Bay.

We don’t have specific figures for that because costs are estimated for the whole facility.

Joan Whiting cannot operate without additional funding and the district health board will not continue to provide a subsidy above the government-designated rate beyond 31 December 2009.  The trust will keep Joan Whiting operating in the interim with financial support from the health integration project and will allocate funds to complete the winding up process and any other obligations, particularly to staff.  This will obviously impact on the funds that will be available from the sale of Joan Whiting assets.

No.  Debt is not a significant issue for Joan Whiting. The only debt is the mortgage and this is an interest-only agreement with SBS. Interest payments annually are low compared with the overall operating losses, which are largely due the staffing levels required to provide good care for the elderly. Joan Whiting is too small to be viable because you have similar overheads whether or not you have 15 or 50 beds and no way of increasing income.