I hope we are all ready for spring and onto some warmer weather. Spring is always a wonderful time of renewal and I know this year many of us will be relieved when it finally arrives.

During one of my recent visits to our transitional care center, I was stopped by a patient who wanted to tell me how impressed he was with his therapy and the knowledge and skill-set of our staff. He was receiving speech therapy in addition to his other needs and had improved beyond his own expectation. This is a common experience for me and one I am grateful to have daily.

St. Ann’s is one of the only senior healthcare and housing systems to employ full time speech therapists and I am proud to say this has been our tradition – not a recent “addition”. We know (and we have always known), the importance of getting you back to good health, of getting the right therapies- at the right time and in the same place and having the certified specialists here for you to make that happen.

Our dedicated therapists have advanced their certifications beyond most to provide services of great benefit to our patients who may have suffered a stroke, who are medically complex, had neurological events, have dementia, cardiac disease and BIG (projected voice training) treatment particularly benefits our patients who have Parkinson’s disease regardless of the event that brought them to us.

To give you an idea of how all the many acronyms equal many benefits; the FEEs (fiberoptic endoscopic evaluation of swallow) gives our patients real-time, on site assessments of their swallowing without having to go off site; this is a significant benefit to recovery when treatments are provided right on site. LSVT (Lee Silverman Voice Treatment) focuses on speech and voice, and LSVT/BIG (voice projection therapy) for Parkinson’s, NDT (neurodevelopmental treatment) for strokes.

I am ever impressed by the knowledge of our staff and we encourage continued education. This is important to them, to our community and to our patients. We feel that our commitment to those who have entrusted us with their care is demonstrated through our actions and being the best at our job is important to us.
My thanks as always to each of you for your continued support.

Warm Regards,

Michael E. McRae

President & CEO