Long Term Care

Hillsboro House has been providing a caring environment for elderly residents of the Contoocook Valley for almost half a century, all under the ownership of three generations of the same local family.

And that caring environment means a place as much like home as possible. Many of our residents and staff members knew each other even before coming to live or to work at Hillsboro House. That’s because they all come from the same local communities and often have made their homes here for years or even decades.

At Hillsboro House, it’s important to us that our residents remain part of the community, close to families and friends, rather than being isolated in a large institution. Even our physical location contributes to that effort: Hillsboro House is only a few blocks from the center of town and within walking distance of the schools, the stores and the churches.

The mission of Hillsboro House is the provision of indivualized care and the continual advancement of quality.  To that end, Hillsboro House continues to identify innovative care pathways and to improve the delivery and experience of care.

• Consistent Assignment

There’s been a concerted effort in recent years to promote the idea of consistent assignment among nursing home providers.  This effort is a result of the conclusion of researchers that a stable staff that minimizes the number of different caregivers leads to better outcomes for nursing home residents.  The consistency engendered by the same nurses caring for the same residents each day results in better quality of care and a heightened sense of well-being for residents.  Consequently, nearly every current nursing home quality initiative articulates as an explicit priority the move toward consistent assignment.

Hillsboro House has had consistent staff assignment for nearly fifty years.  To us, it has always made sense to support the personal and familiar relationship between our staff and our residents.

• Long term care design

In the 1970’s, places like the Philadelphia Geriatric Center began experimenting with the de-institutionalization of nursing home design.  In the following decades, researchers explored the link between the built environment of health care facilities and the outcomes experienced by residents of those facilities.  Specifically, they recognized a causal association between small, residential environments and measureable improvement in physical and emotional health of nursing home residents.

This makes sense.  Small nursing homes are linked with decreased agitation, maintained cognitive function, greater mobility and a lower incidence of psychotropic medication use.  Moreover, the design of these facilities to include shared, homelike spaces linked by short hallways is now considered an effective, non-pharmacological intervention for residents with dementia.  The language used to describe this phenomenon has evolved in the intervening decades and some large nursing homes have begun to embrace the idea of deinstitutionalization.  Whether it’s called the built environment, or social density ratio or evidence based design, Hillsboro House has always very deliberately maintained an environment  that best creates a home.

In general, however, the best way to get a feeling about Hillsboro House as a caring home for seniors is to come and visit us or see our photo gallery. Our corridor walls have photographs of many of our former residents. There are names and pictures that recall the heritage and history of our communities. Many are from families who have lived and worked in the Contoocook Valley towns for years, sometimes for generations. So while these photographs represent the history of Hillsboro House, they are also a part of the history of the communities we serve.