Chatham’s long-term care facilities reopen ‘softly’ to visitors

By Victoria Johnson

PITTSBORO — Inside Cambridge Hills Assisted Living, a pair of white double doors guards the entryway to the facility’s 90-bed residential section, a guard shift that’s lasted over a year. But after 16 stressful months, those doors have finally opened to visitors — and resident Irma Ellis rejoices that her family was among the first to “dart” on through.

“They couldn’t wait to get here,” Ellis said with a laugh. “ … My son got here first.”

During the height of the pandemic, Ellis went months at a time without seeing her family members’ faces. She primarily communicated with them by phone and via letters — not FaceTime or window visits.

“Even my son said, ‘Now, Mom, I can call you two or three times a week, but I can’t come to the window and talk to you. I can’t stand it. I just — I’d rather talk to you,’” said Ellis, who will turn 88 this month. “I was so happy when I could hug him again, but you know, it’s been hard. It’s really been hard.”

As COVID-19 cases plummet and vaccinations increase, many of Chatham County’s long-term care facilities like Cambridge Hills have once again begun reopening to visitors — that is, if you’re vaccinated.

Cambridge Hills’ Executive Director Mike Walters put out the facility’s new “soft opening” policy on June 14, allowing family members to enter the residential section and conduct private visits in their loved ones’ rooms. Before that, the facility would only let family members past their double doors on compassion visits.

“So really, other than that, families weren’t going past our lobby,” Walters told the News & Record. “So you could have a contact visit; in other words, you could sit right there and hold your mom or dad’s hand sitting on the couch. You could take them out with you for ice cream, you could take them out for 10 days, if you wanted to. We just don’t let you go down the halls.”

It’s a “soft opening,” he said, “because reopening to me is when we are just wide open, come on in, roll to the building.” But even this relaxed policy requires several safety measures. First and foremost, only fully vaccinated people can cross that double-door threshold for private, in-room visits.

That’s not just Cambridge Hills’ policy either, he added; it’s the North Carolina Dept. of Health and Human Services’ rule. Unvaccinated residents may visit relatives or friends in the lobby or portico, but they must stay masked the entire time.

“Yes, the vaccine is going to protect them, you know, a lot,” Walters said, “but that doesn’t mean that they can’t get sick. They are seniors, and they still do have somewhat compromised health, so while you and I may not suffer real bad if we get COVID after vaccination, they still might.”

Even vaccinated visitors have to wear masks at some point during the visit. Upon entering, staff will screen masked up visitors for COVID-19 at the front and ask for proof that they’re vaccinated. If visitors can’t or decline to submit proof, staff will assume they’re unvaccinated.

“If the regulations say in order for you to have a close contact visit of that nature that you and the loved one and the person has to be vaccinated, well, I know your mom got vaccinated, I was here for that,” Walters said. “I don’t know what you’ve done. So without showing it to me, I just can’t confirm. It’s a one-time thing, and then we keep that, you know, so that we don’t bug you about it twice.”

Upon proving vaccination status, visitors then walk directly to their loved ones’ rooms and may only take off their masks once they’re inside and the door’s closed.

“So, no loving on the family members down the hall that you know, because you know, people know people here in this community; it’s great,” Walters said. “But you can’t stop and chat with Sally and Susie and Johnny, you got to go straight to the room and get in there and close the door.”

It’s all about controlling what staff can control, Walters said. While residents are vaccinated, only about 60% to 70% of the facility’s staff have been jabbed and visitors, vaccinated or not, can still take their relatives out of the building whenever they like.

“That’s been our whole approach this whole time — we’re going to be really strict because I just did not want to go through the trauma, the potential trauma, of calling families and saying we’ve got this thing going through this building and people are dying left and right,” he said. “I just — I couldn’t have slept. I wouldn’t have — you know what I’m saying?”

Other Chatham long-term care facilities have been following similar policies as well, some weeks before Cambridge Hills. According to its website, Genesis’ Siler City Center recently began offering in-room visitations to all residents regardless of vaccination status, with few exceptions.

As of June 1, the Laurels of Chatham in Pittsboro resumed its pre-COVID visitation hours, though staff have asked residents to limit their visits to once per day.

“So far, people have been really cool,” Walters said. “I mean, I know that that’s a sensitive subject, and I think people have understood that we’re not trying to pry in your business. We’re not trying to make a political statement. We’re doing none of those things. We’re just trying to make sure we do it right.”

‘It’s so much better now’

Just days before Cambridge Hills put out its new policy, Walters remembers receiving an influx of people “hitting the doors.” Word had leaked out about the facility’s upcoming “soft opening” and some families just couldn’t wait.

“It’s an exciting time. People haven’t been able to just embrace their loved one in over a year, you know?” he said, adding, “When we opened up to allow contact visits — in other words, you can sit there on the couch and literally just hug your family member — I mean, I couldn’t go out there because people were bawling (their) eyes (out). Nobody’s eyes were dry.”

After months of limited or no visitations, Cambridge Hills’ slow but steadily loosening restrictions have meant the world to both residents and their family members.

“Our residents, their morale was really good through that time, through that most challenging year of their lives, and now you feel a new energy,” Walters said, adding, “It was nice to start to really see that new energy coming when people got to visit in person instead of just on FaceTime or through the window. I mean, it’s brightened the place up.”

Before COVID-19 upended everything, at least one person from Gina Thompson’s family would visit her grandmother Irene in Cambridge Hills every single day.

“So then having over a year to where we couldn’t see her at all was really hard, and we were all really worried that she may not thrive as well as she was prior to,” Thompson, 46, told the News & Record. “(Staff) would put things up on Facebook, so we could still see her, and they made sure that we were still seeing other things she was doing and that she was thriving, but just not having that one-on-one interaction was really hard for the families.”

They kept in touch with Irene via phone calls and 15-minute FaceTime calls. They celebrated her 96th birthday through the window and sang to her through the phone. They even waved to her in drive-thru parades and eventually spoke to her during outside visits with masks.

But it wasn’t quite the same — and that’s why Cambridge’s timed in-person lobby visits and now its “soft opening” have been “huge,” Thompson said.

She and her husband visited Irene in her room for the first time last Thursday in over a year.

“We could actually be in her room without masks and it wasn’t like a timed, you know, 30 minutes and we had to go,” she said. “We were able to spend a couple hours with her, so that was nice. It’s so much better now.”

Her grandmother, Thompson said, will be 97 in early July and didn’t always understand why her family wasn’t coming in as often as they used to before the pandemic. Now, thanks to Cambridge Hills’ loosening restrictions, Thompson said she’s excited.

“She’s like, ‘It’s been so long since y’all came in,’” Thompson added.

Last Thursday, Becky Fricke, 65, crossed Cambridge’s double doors for the first time since last March for an in-person visit with her mother, Kit, who’s 92. She’d been able to see her mother in the last two months before that, but many of those visits were often distanced, masked and timed.

“And then now it’s, you know, I can come and see her in person and actually touch her,” Fricke said. “The first time I touched her was a month or so ago, and it was after more than a year of not being able to touch her.”

She added with a laugh, “And I love hugging my mother.”

Last Thursday was also Jim Brewer’s first in-room visit with his great aunt, Carrie Campen, who’s about to turn 102.

“But I’m so tickled to be here today,” he said right before the visit. “I just can’t wait.”

Throughout the pandemic, Brewer kept in contact with Campen by phone every week — “when it was working good” — and visited her by her window a few times.

“It’s worked out OK because we’ve had window visits and we had a lobby visit a couple times and several window visits over the year,” he said, adding, “It was really a challenge because they’re on one side with a telephone and I’m on the side with a cell phone, but if you can look someone in the eye, it means so much.”

He’d last seen her in person about a month ago.

“And that day? I got to give her a hug,” Brewer said, smiling. “… I’m so excited to see her.”

So far, Walters said, Cambridge’s new policies have been well received and he hasn’t yet received any negative feedback. Noncompliance hasn’t been an issue, either.

So, what’s his advice for visitors? Get vaccinated.

“If you don’t have vaccines, I can’t let you past the double doors,” he said. “It’s not a, ‘Hey, I want you to get the shot. It’s just the reality. I still have to protect this building and our folks, and we’re just going to have to take the safeguards that we have to take. I’m not putting my guard down. Not yet. We’re not there yet.”