Windsor House expands mission to serve elderly poor

The company will open its 10th nursing home in Champion next month.
By CYNTHIA VINARSKY
VINDICATOR BUSINESS WRITER
GIRARD -- John Masternick is the first to admit he didn't especially like senior citizens when he started out in the nursing home business 45 years ago.
"I was young," said Masternick, the 77-year-old owner and founder of Girard-based Windsor House Inc. "I didn't like doddering old people, and I hated nursing homes."
A life-changing experience at a Catholic retreat a few years later turned his attitude around. Since then, Masternick said, he's made it his mission to provide high-quality, low-cost, long-term care for the Valley's elderly poor.
To make sure each Windsor House home follows through with that mission, he and his son John J. Masternick, corporation vice president, make frequent visits to each of the Windsor House's nine facilities in northeast Ohio and northwestern Pennsylvania.
Windsor House, one of the Mahoning Valley's largest nursing home chains with 1,500 employees, provides 1,400 skilled nursing and assisted living beds in the two states.
The company is making plans to open its 10th facility this fall, the 84-bed, 42,000-square-foot Windsor House at Champion now under construction.
Officials chose the site on East Glendola Avenue in Champion because their research identified the Trumbull County township as a growth community in need of a new long-term care facility.
Masternick Jr., 39, said the chain's newest center will include a separate Alzheimer's disease and dementia wing; physical, occupational and speech therapy services; and a walkway to accommodate patients who like to be on the move. Like other Windsor House locations, food will be prepared on site.
The newest building is larger than the others the corporation operates because the rooms are larger and designed to provide every resident with a window, double the number of windows required by the state. It will employ about 100 people.
Conservative growth
Masternick Jr. said the owners always have been conservative about growth and have no immediate plans to expand further.
"This is a personal business, and you can't keep it personal if you get too big," he said.
Masternick Sr. said he was a practicing attorney in 1959 when a client asked him to consider investing in Milton Manor, a nursing facility in an old hotel in Lake Milton. He signed on as one of four partners in the facility and did what he had to do to keep it running, but he didn't enjoy the business.
In 1964, he found a new purpose and commitment after accepting a law associate's invitation to attend a three-day Cursillo weekend, part of a spiritual renewal movement within the Catholic Church.
He was deeply moved by a biblical passage in which Jesus says people will be judged by how they care for the least of society. Masternick still carries a copy of that passage from Matthew 25 and calls it his "guiding light."
Soon after the retreat, he and his wife, Dorothy, a registered nurse, began converting old mansions on Youngstown's North Side into nursing homes.
"My mission was to provide the very best for poor, old people," he said.
Next they started building new facilities, a novel idea at the time. They began with a new building in Andover, but the concept of building a nursing home facility was so new that it took three years to get financing.
Windsor House built about 20 new nursing homes since the mid-1960s, Masternick Sr. said, many of them eventually sold to other owners.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the Valley's steel industry collapsed and thousands of jobs were lost, the Masternicks decided to make a $5 million investment in Youngstown, building two new nursing homes along Belmont Avenue.
"That area around Belmont Avenue has become a medical corridor, and I'd like to think that our putting a medical complex in there had something to do with it," Masternick Jr. said.
Growing industry
The nursing home industry has become much more competitive, and customer service oriented since they started in the business, he said. Virtually every nursing home used to operate at 100 percent capacity with a waiting list, but a new emphasis on home care and assisted living have changed that.
"Those days in our industry are long gone," Masternick Jr. said. "There's been a shift in the whole continuum of care. The traditional nursing home patient is now in an assisted-living facility; the traditional recovering hospital patient is now in a nursing home; and the typical assistant-living facility resident is now still at home, with more services [provided] from the community."
Masternick Jr. said the company has found a way around the staffing shortage that plagues many in the health-care industry -- it often foots the bill for employees who want to study to be a practical nurse, a registered nurse or a nurse assistant. The debt is forgiven if the employee agrees to continue at a Windsor House facility for a specified period.
"Even if they don't come to work for us, we figure it's one more nurse out there working," he said. "But in most cases, they stay with us."
The nursing home industry is heavily regulated, more even than the nuclear energy industry, the younger Masternick said. It helps that he and his father are both lawyers, and the corporation also employs Atty. John Daliman as chief administrative officer and house counsel.
Other top officials include Leo Grimes, president and executive director, and Kenneth James, chief financial officer.
vinarsky@vindy.com