(upbeat music) - Hi, I'm Jacqui Tricarico, Senior Correspondent for "One-on-One," and joining us now is Dr.

Vincent Barba, who is the Chief Medical Officer at Matheny Hospital located in Peapack, New Jersey.

So great to have you with us, Doctor.

- Thank you, Jacqui, great to be here.

- Well, first, for people who don't know, tell us about Matheny and the patients that you serve there.

- Great, Matheny is actually, we're celebrating our 80th year now in New Jersey.

And Matheny is, it's a bunch of things.

It's an organization dedicated to the care and education of children and adults with medically complex developmental disabilities.

So we're located, our main campus is here in Peapack where we have our 101 bed special hospital, and we have a special school here on campus for pre-K-3 up through extended high school, which, for the developmentally disabled, is 21 years of age.

Then we have group homes around the state.

We have seven group homes, and we have a day program for adults that's located in Hillsborough, New Jersey, not too far away from us.

And we also have an arts access program, which is kind of like a fine arts development program, again, for the same population of people living with disabilities.

Talking about the healthcare part of it, barriers to healthcare we know are really important to discuss when we're talking about those with developmental disabilities.

Talk about how Matheny is filling that gap in the community that you serve.

- Yeah, so our kind of specialty in the developmental disability world is the medically complex.

So our special hospital serves people in a long-term basis.

So it's a long-term care hospital.

Our length of stay is measured in years, not in days, and people basically live with us.

We've had some people that have lived with us from when they were three, four years old, and now they're in their 30s and 40s and they're living here.

The medical care for this population, and it's a very heterogeneous population of people, so some are more medically complex than the others.

We know that developmentally disabled people do have a higher incidence of chronic diseases.

They do have a higher incidence of cardiac disease and definitely respiratory diseases.

So they're really at risk in respiratory viral season from influenza, COVID, things like that.

And there are gaps.

These are usually people that are covered by Medicaid, maybe don't have access to physicians and other practitioners.

A lot of physicians and other practitioners do not have experience in dealing with this population.

So it's tough for families to find good care for their loved ones with developmental disabilities.

- Is it hard to find the staff that you need to run a facility like that because of the complex needs of the patients?

- Well, since the pandemic, it's been incredibly hard to find nurses.

Nurses have been in short supply.

A lot of people left the nursing profession.

And then to find nurses that are really drawn in, this field draws people into it, and it's not for everyone.

Not everyone is going to be able to work with this patient population.

We work with several nursing schools across the state, as well as with New Jersey Medical School in Newark to train the next generation of nurses and doctors.

We also work with clinical therapy schools, PT schools, OT schools, speech therapy schools to try to help people discover this field because it's not something that, this patient population you don't usually run across often in your training.

And some people, once they discover a place like Matheny, they realize that this is their calling.

So we work with schools around the state to try to get people interested, educated, and trained.

We have a great record of longevity for our employees here.

Every year we kind of celebrate longevity and we have people that have worked with us their entire career, since they were in school.

Some of our directors now have really never worked anywhere else.

They came here as students, and they were recruited by us, and they've been with us, and now they're directors of the organization.

So it's really, but it's tough for families.

A person with, let's say, cerebral palsy comes with a lot of equipment, so they're in a chair.

They're usually in a custom-made chair, which is kind of big.

They go into a regular doctor's office.

The doctor's office is usually not ready for them.

They may not be able to fit well in the examining room.

No one's going to be able to get them out of that chair onto the examining table.

A big piece of this puzzle is getting dental care for this population.

So you go to your dentist, you sit in the dental chair, they adjust you, and they take care of you.

It's difficult for people living with a developmental disability to go to the dentist.

There are not many dentists that are comfortable and skilled in taking care of the population and the special needs that they may have.

And there's not many dental offices that can handle physically transferring somebody to the dental chair or being able to examine them in their wheelchair.

That's something that our dentist here does a great job in.

And then, as if that wasn't complicated enough, many of the patients are not comfortable with the dental exam.

So unfortunately, what you see in this population is a lot of folks having to go to a hospital to get put under general anesthesia so they can get a dental exam.

And that's complicated, right?

Because there's morbidity.

- And risks.

- And mortality at risk for folks that are getting general anesthesia.

So our team here, we have a dentist that just works with us.

She works very closely with our entire team, especially with the speech therapist.

And what we do with our dental patients is we work on what we call desensitizing them to the dental exam so that they become more comfortable with the examination and we don't have to bring them to the hospital and put them under anesthesia.

-Speaking a little bit about that preventative care too, I just quickly, for the last minute, I want to talk about the caregivers portion of this discussion, because they're the ones who are often feeling so overwhelmed by all of the specialized appointments that they have and all these things, and preventative care often falls to the wayside.

How are you helping the caregivers through all of this as well?

- So if you think about somebody with cerebral palsy, you think about a little kid.

And mom and dad may be able to take care of their son or daughter when they're small.

But many people with cerebral palsy have very normal lifespans.

And now maybe your little son is now a six-foot tall, 220 pound man, and it's not so easy for you to pick them up and do everything that they need to have done for them every day.

So the patients that we admit to our hospital here, they cannot dress themselves, they cannot feed themselves, they cannot change themselves.

They don't use the toilet.

They can't do any of that.

So mom and dad often get to a point in their lives, usually around teenage, late teenage years, where they're no longer able to deliver that care at home, let alone get them out into the community, let alone get them to the doctors and all the specialists that they might need to see, et cetera.

And then that's when they usually entertain admitting their loved one here.

And we have a whole team that does all that for them.

But that's usually the time course for our patients is, as they get closer to adulthood, mom and dad now are also aging.

It's tougher for them to take care of their loved one and they look around.

This is the only place in New Jersey that delivers this kind of care, comprehensive care for adults.

- And those families are so lucky when they're able to find you, and find Matheny, and you and your colleagues, and the passion, and the work that you're doing.

Thank you so much for giving us some more information about the important work you're doing and continue to do in New Jersey.

Thank you so much, Doctor.

- Thank you, Jacqui.

- We appreciate it.

For Steve Adubato and myself, thanks for watching.

We'll see you next time.

- [Narrator] One-On-One with Steve Adubato is a production of the Caucus Educational Corporation.

Funding has been provided by The Fidelco Group.

PSE&G.

The New Jersey Economic Development Authority.

Delta Dental of New Jersey.

EJI, Excellence in Medicine Awards.

A New Jersey health foundation program.

RWJBarnabas Health.

Learn More at RWJBH.org.

NJ Transit.

New Jersey Sharing Network.

And by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Promotional support provided by The Chamber of Commerce Southern New Jersey.

And by Insider NJ.

- (Soft music) - (Softly)Is that?

- Wow.

(Children laughing) - (Softly) It’s gonna be okay.