Residents top priority at HLRC

Karl Rude has been the interim Administrator at the Hi-Line Retirement Center in Malta since August and while some things have changed at the center, others have stayed the same, most importantly, the idea that residents come first.

“Residents are number one,” Rude said last week. “I go beyond the phrase ‘residents are number one.’ We are doing what is best for our residents and sometimes that comes with some difficult decisions.”

Rude’s companies, Health Management Services LLC (HMS), located in Billings, Mont., operate facilities throughout Montana, Wyoming and North Dakota, specialize in facility management, strategic planning and marketing and was founded by Rude’s father, Joe (who is the company’s President) in 1983. In Montana, HMS runs three skilled nursing facilities – Valley View Home in Glasgow, Wibaux’s County Nursing Home and now the HLRC – as well as owning Big Sky Senior Living in Butte. All told, over the three states, HMS owns or operates three assisted living facilities, five medical centers and eight skilled nursing facilities.

“It is a family business,” Rude, VP of HMS said. “I have been back with the company for the past 18-months, but I started here in high school as my first job.”

Between stints with the family company, Rude spent nearly 10 years in law enforcement, the last eight and a half years with the Billings Police Department. Working as a police officer, Rude said one of the most important things he learned was conflict mitigation.

“I learned you can have a conversation with somebody and learn how to de-escalate crisis. I find that as I come back to management, if you have to make changes or if things aren’t going right, people generally don’t do things knowing that they are wrong. They do things with their scope of the best intentions for their goal and you have to be able to broaden their horizons, in a productive manner, so they can see the overall effect and guide them to a course of a different result.”

In early July, The HLRC Board of Directors voted unanimously in favor of a five-year contract with HMS following the announcement that the retirement center was in financial trouble.

“The residents must always come first and this is ultimately the reason for our success,” Rude said following the announcement of the contract. Rude said that since coming in as interim Administrator since that announcement, things were bleak at first but are becoming “steadily better” at HLRC.

“If the town had not brought a half million dollars to the door, you’re done, it was over,” Rude said. “My guess is, and it is more academic than anything and we will get a kind of picture of it at some point as we’re looking at our financial statements, but we were about 20-days away from closing.”

As of this week, there are 63 residents in HLRC’s nursing home, nearly at the capacity for the building. Though the center was in real trouble financially, according to Rude, one of the positive things he noticed right away was the dedication of the staff to the HLRC’s residents.

“Once you get inside and see it, it is pretty clear,” Rude said. “Our staff loves our residents. Our department heads love our residents and they do what is right for them. It is really neat.”

Straightaway, Rude said, the staff has been receptive to change and made sacrifices. The new benefit package at the HLRC doesn’t have the same vacation time as it used to have, for instance, and many staff members have been asked to change from four, 12-hour shifts and into a work week which consists of five 8-hour shifts.

One of the grumblings people have voiced with how the HLRC does business is the traveling nurses the center brings in to work instead of hiring locals with the experience and training to do the jobs.

“People, in general and outside of the industry, have a hard-view on travel staff,” Rude said. “And I have my frustrations with travel staff, but you also have to face the reality of where else would they come from?”

Rude said that any nurses who live locally and would like to come back and work at HLRC can come and talk to him.

“Anybody who carries that certification around town and can help me lighten that load of travel staff, we will talk,” he said. “I want responsible employees who respect the institution and I will pay a respectful wage. You will meet clear expectations and I will provide clear expectations.”

The community of Phillips County was asked to donate $500,000 to assist HLRC during it’s time of financial straits. Rude said that those problems had to do with debt-to-equity ratio – the building, though large and new – was about 10-percent bigger than it needed to be with the competition of the Country Home at the time. Rude explained that there were more licensed beds (about 15 too many) than the community could support.

“The building could survive on the debt that it had, barely,” Rude added. “It was just eating itself to death on how much debt they were servicing.”

As for the $500,000 raised for the HLRC over the last several months, it is all but spent.

“That $500,000 was spent on operations,” Rude said. “It was not like they had (the money) to buy a new X or invest it into a Y. It was payroll and it was necessary. I think, more often than not, when people are giving $100,000 gifts, they want to know that it is in a foundation, but it went straight into stopping the bleeding. It was necessary to keep the employees paid, keeping people in the building and keep the lights and power on. It went straight into operations.”

Rude spends much of his time traveling between Billings and Malta as interim Administrator of the HLRC. Some of the time Rude has spent in Malta has been conducting interviews for a permanent president for the center. He said several worthy candidates have applied and been interviewed.