Recipient of the 2023 Helen J. Napps Award of Excellence: Michelle Temple

Note: Michelle was nominated by her Director, Renata Sharnick, of Piedmont Senior Resources. She always strives to be the best Ombudsman she can be. Below are a few examples where Michelle showed all the qualities needed to be nominated for the Helen J. Napps Award of Excellence.

I would like to nominate Michelle Temple for Helen J. Napps Award of Excellence. Michelle has been working for Piedmont Senior Resources for 7 years, and she is definitely the best Ombudsman I have ever worked with. She is very determined, persuasive, bold, diligent, and amazing.

Michelle is very sincere, honest, and modest. An example I can give is a relationship with one of her residents and how she went beyond her job responsibilities. Due to LTC Medicaid regulations, a piece of property the father had left the resident had been up for sale for years. It finally sold. No one had been in the trailer, but there was a portrait of the resident’s grandmother there that she desperately wanted to keep. With a little persuasion, the Realtor who sold her property agreed to go over to the trailer with his phone and do a video walk-through with Michelle. The day he got to the trailer, the front door was cracked open a bit, and a large black snake was peeking out. Because of Michelle’s concern for this resident, the Realtor went home and got snake spray and a long-handled tool. After discussing where the portrait must be, he broke through the bedroom window and retrieved the portrait safely. He then dropped it off to Michelle for the resident.

Another quality Michelle possesses is her sensitivity, patience, tolerance, compassion, and discretion. When she first started in her role, she was denied introduction to a particular facility administrator. Michelle did not want the administrator who had been running this facility for many years to think she could intimidate Michelle or scare her off. It took MANY years to build a good working relationship, but through her patience, she gained their trust and proved that her goal was not to get them in trouble when things went wrong, but to advocate for the residents.

Michelle is very easily adaptable, creative, and resourceful in her role. In March of 2020, all visitors were restricted from entering nursing homes due to COVID. Only window visits were allowed, and a resident’s daughter could see her mother was physically declining and also seemed unkempt. Only limited Compassionate Care visits were allowed with residents who were at the end of their life. By May, the resident was declining personal care offered by the staff. The daughter wanted desperately to provide care for her mother as she had always done. Michelle directed multiple phone calls and email correspondence to the administrator asking for an exception. By September, revised guidance was published with four additional examples of Compassionate Care visits. None of them matched the proposal Michelle had made. The administrator finally agreed with her position and said he would be fine with the daughter coming into the facility in full PPE, but now Corporate Ownership denied the request. It might have ended there, but this administrator pushed it up through his corporate chain of command and got them to agree that this kind of Resident-Centered Care clearly falls under the new Compassionate Care Guidelines. Not only that, parent company changed their Compassionate Care Visitation Policy and instructed ALL Administrators in ALL of their facilities to implement the same plan that rehab was establishing. At that time, the parent company owned 121 facilities in 7 states. It was because of Michelle’s boldness, diligence, persuasiveness, and determination she enabled many residents to be taken care of by their loved ones.