All power has been restored to Matheny. As a result The Matheny School will reopen on Wednesday, November 7. All phone and online services are also up and running.
Our thoughts are with all of our families, friends and supporters during this difficult time, and we hope you are recovering from the storm and are able to return to a normal life as soon as possible.
Due to the effects of Hurricane Sandy, Matheny is currently operating on emergency generators. Our medical staff is working full-time, and all of our patients are fine. Although our external telephone service has been restored, it is subject to intermittent outages. If you have a true emergency and need to reach Matheny, please call (908) 216-4139.
The Matheny School will be closed Monday, November 5, and Tuesday, November 6. A decision about the rest of the week will be made by noon on November 6. Parents of day students will be notified via the phone chain. Parents of students residing at Matheny will be able to access information on the Matheny website and Facebook page.
Katherine, packing one of three boxes of supplies.
Matheny student Katherine Gaudio asked Matheny employees to donate school supplies for a special project being undertaken by her Girl Scout troop, part of SU69 Girl Scouts of the Heart of New Jersey serving Bedminster and Bernardsville, NJ.
Katherine and her fellow scouts were collecting the supplies for the children at The Somerset Home for Temporarily Displaced Children,
(www.somersethome.org) a nonprofit agency in Bridgewater, NJ, dedicated to providing a variety of services to youth and young adults who are at risk of homelessness or maltreatment. Every year, the agency helps more than 500 children, teenagers and families.
Katherine was able to pack three boxes of supplies, which included notebooks, loose-leaf paper, pocket folders and pencils.
Matheny student Daniel Gaudreau, assisted by Christine Mayercik, uses the eye tracker to click on a Taylor Swift music video.
Matheny student Daniel Gaudreau is able to select his favorite music videos by gazing at a computer screen. It’s part of a new indirect access communications program made possible by an $8,451 grant to the Matheny School from the Summit Area Public Foundation. With the grant, Matheny is training students with medically complex developmental disabilities to control a computer by using visual tracking and scanning technology.
Gaudreau is learning how to use this technology with assistance from Matheny speech-language pathologist Christine Mayercik. For example, he chooses Taylor Swift and Gangnam Style music videos over a video clip of President Barack Obama appearing on the David Letterman Show. “You need to look for two green lights,” Mayercik advises Gaudreau. “Then an arrow will take you to the next screen, and the finger pointer will take you to the video.”
The equipment used for this project was purchased with funds from the SAPF grant and has been set up on a dedicated computer table that will allow students easy access. “The trial group of students is using the eye tracker during therapy sessions,” Mayercik reports. “Students are able to maneuver the cursor around the screen and use either an eye blink or maintain the cursor in one spot for a predetermined amount of time to activate a mouse click. PowerPoint is used for practice activities where students have to use either one click, to change a slide moving through a presentation, or two clicks to activate an animation and then change slides.”
Once students become comfortable with this technology, they will be encouraged to begin using it during off-program hours with support from Matheny’s recreation therapy staff.
Teaching students to use technology such as the eye tracker system is integral to Matheny’s goal of improving the lives of its students and patients. This technology not only facilitates education and increases leisure activity options, it also enables unprecedented levels of communication between the students and patients and their teachers, family and community.
Morristown Medical Center is one of Matheny's partner hospitals in its transitional nursing program.
Matheny has completed the first year of its program, designed to improve the quality of transition care for patients who are admitted to acute care hospitals, and the initial results have been very favorable. A grant from the Robert Wood Johnson New Jersey Health Initiatives program enabled us to provide transitional nursing care to inpatients, residents of our group homes and outpatients from the Matheny Center of Medicine Dentistry.
In the first year of this program’s operation, from July 1, 2011, to June 30, 2012, twenty-eight patients were followed into and from our partner hospitals Morristown Medical Center, Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick and Somerset Medical Center in Somerville. The program ensured a smooth transition among care settings and the transmittal of vitally important patient information, such as a patient’s medical history and suggested strategies for communicating with non-verbal patients. In addition, information about individual orthopedic and positioning needs and other specific medical needs were readily available.
The project’s goal was to reduce the number of hospital readmissions of patients with developmental disabilities. The readmission rate of Matheny patients since the project’s beginning has been 7.1%. In the 10-month period immediately preceding the start of the program, the readmission rate was 25%.
From left, Arts Access director Eileen Murray; Matheny adult patient Rasheedah Mahali; and Café Azzurro owner/chef Beni Mavraj.
Café Azzurro, located on Main Street in Peapack, NJ, is the newest food sponsor for Full Circle 2012: Unexpected Art, the annual celebration of Matheny’s Arts Access Program, which enables people with disabilities to create fine art, assisted by professional artist-facilitators. The northern Italian restaurant joins cocoLuxe fine pastries, Peapack; Gladstone Tavern, Gladstone; 3 West, Basking Ridge; and Village Office Supply, Somerset, all of whom have provided food and beverages at past Full Circles.
Full Circle will be held from 3-6 p.m., Saturday, November 3, in the Robert Schonhorn Arts Center at Matheny. For more information or to order tickets, call (908) 234-0011, ext. 260, or email pcats@matheny.org.
Volunteer firefighter Thompson Ross, fully outfitted as if he were getting ready to fight a fire, visits with Matheny students Nicholas Barros, left, and Jack Harter. Ross, a Peapack-Gladstone resident, is an emergency medical technician (EMT) in Cedar Knolls, NJ. At left is Matheny personal care assistant Mulualem Yihune.
Elementary students at the Matheny School have been learning about fire safety and firefighters. So, when the Peapack-Gladstone volunteer Fire Department invited us to bring some of the students to the station for a visit, it was not only fun, but a real learning experience as well.
P-G Chief of Police Greg Skinner, who is also a volunteer firefighter, demonstrated several pieces of equipment, introduced some of his fellow volunteers and explained that the class could be interrupted at any time if the alarm went off, signaling a real fire in the twin boroughs.
The fire department visit is an example of how skills and behaviors learned in the classroom are practiced during interactive trips to various community resources. We’re very grateful to the Peapack-Gladstone volunteer firefighters who made time to spend time with our students.
Matheny teacher Karen Dakak uses an iPad to help Nicholas Barros see some of the equipment better.
“Out Any Place” by Jason Weiner.
“If I saw this show in Chelsea, I would be impressed.” That’s how Dan Fenelon, curator of the visual arts exhibition at Full Circle 2012: Unexpected Art, describes the visual art that will be on display in the Robert Schonhorn Arts Center at Matheny from 3 p.m.—6 p.m. on Saturday, Nov. 3. Arts Access enables people with disabilities to create fine art, assisted by professional artist-facilitators. Full Circle is the annual celebration of the Arts Access Program.
Forty-five pieces of contemporary visual fine art will be on display in a gallery reception beginning at 3 p.m., followed by a 4 p.m. stage presentation showcasing choreography/dance, drama and poetry, all created by Arts Access artists. Fenelon is an award-winning artist who continually gives back to local communities. His work has been shown in galleries in New York, Miami, Boston, Philadelphia and Santa Fe, and he recently completed The Peace Summit Mural in Newark. “You can expect to see the work of some very impressive artists at Full Circle,” he says. “And the work is moving from the geometric abstract style to aspects of folk or urban art.”
“Mom” by Michael Arin.
For more information about Full Circle or to order tickets, call (908) 234-0011, ext. 260, or email pcats@matheny.org.
Raking leaves and helping to spruce up the courtyard outside the Matheny Center of Medicine and Dentistry were these Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation volunteers. From left: Sewhan Chon, Karin Hunziker, Ana Bastiani-Posner, Holly Crosbie-Foote, Duncan McKechnie and Lori Tempsick.
On October 4, Matheny received hands-on help from 14 employees of Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation (NPC), who helped clean up and beautify our grounds. The employees were participating in the company’s 16th annual Community Partnership Day, a global initiative within the Novartis Group that reaffirms the company’s commitment to social responsibility.
According to Kevin Rigby, vice president of public affairs and communications at Novartis, Community Day enables the company to “share our resources with the communities where we live and work, provide employees with meaningful opportunities to give back and make a positive, long-lasting difference in people’s lives.”
Peter Longa, surrounded by many of his nursing colleagues. He’s holding a congratulatory painting created by Pearl Chiang, a nurse-artist, standing to his left.
Peter Longa, a native of Sudan who was forced by civil war to leave his country in 1991, joined Matheny as a personal care assistant three years later. A recipient of a Matheny Nursing Scholarship Award, Longa received his nursing certificate from Raritan Valley Community College in North Branch, NJ, and, while there, was awarded the Joanne Nitcheky Sergeant Award for excellence in clinical nursing. In 2006, he was selected to receive the Governor’s Nursing Merit Award in the Registered Nurse Post Acute Category. Longa earned an MSN at the University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey and recently completed his doctorate in nursing practice program, also at UMDNJ.
Since 2010, Longa has been the night nursing supervisor at Matheny, and on one recent morning, as he was preparing to leave for home, his colleagues surprised him with a congratulatory breakfast.
Longa, after recovering from his surprise, talked about “the spirit of family at Matheny,” which has kept him here for 18 years. In a 2004 article in Advance for Nurses, Longa had talked about the Matheny patients. “You need to get to know them in order to communicate,” he said. “I think nursing is all about caring, taking care of people. To me, that is the bottom line.”
And no one does it better than Longa. “When I come here in the morning,” said Steve Proctor, president, “I see Peter, and I know everything is okay.”
Longa, after receiving his doctorate, accompanied by his wife Poni, son Tomor and daughter Sophia.
