Point of View

Ask anyone who’s been there, and there are many – they’ll say they just want to get better and go home as soon as possible.

Helping someone through inpatient physical rehabilitation – and its related occupational and speech therapies – and getting them back into action as quickly as possible, with the best results possible, is high on everyone’s list.  That’s especially true if you are the one who has suffered a disabling condition or illness.

It doesn’t matter how debilitating the injury or condition is – whether it is severe and requires an intensive therapeutic intervention, or if it is mild but still requires an intervention that keeps someone away from their familiar surroundings and routine.

To address this, later this year, VillageCare will be opening a brand-new Rehabilitation and Nursing Center, now under construction on West Houston.  While this state-of-the-art facility and its innovative residential arrangements are the next logical step in serving the short-stay rehabilitation needs of the community, the enhanced physical surroundings that will be provided there are not the entire story.

Not by a long shot.

Back in January, I talked here about the revolution that’s going on in long-term care in creating ways for people to choose where they would live and allow them to determine the way the services they need are delivered.  In this column, I’d like to expand on that notion.

A little background:  VillageCare got into “short-term rehab” back in the mid-to-late 1990s, when we created new therapy space on the sixth floor of Village Nursing Home.  We later designated the entire fifth floor as a discrete residential unit for rehab patients.

That initiative really changed the way we at VillageCare saw the nursing home’s role, and it also began to change the way people in the community thought of Village Nursing Home.  There’s a good chance that if you live downtown or on the West Side and you’ve needed inpatient therapy over the past decade or so, you’ve experienced care at our nursing home.

What’s happened at Village Nursing Home over that time is that it became less and less a place where people came to spend the rest of their lives in a supported nursing environment, and more a place where they come to get help to get better – and to return home.

Our short-stay restorative program has only gotten better since we embarked on this journey, and we’ve gotten better at delivering care and giving patients what they are looking for.

And it’s no accident.

In 2006, VillageCare launched a long-term care reform demonstration project that we called SeniorChoices.  Long-term care is the name applied to services such as nursing homes, home care, assisted living and the like.  It’s sometimes also called continuing care.

The demonstration, financed by the state Legislature and the state Department of Health, sought to accomplish a number of things, including “rightsizing” long-term care capacity, reducing nursing home use and making more efficient use of Medicaid.

One of the actions VillageCare undertook early on was to double the number of beds at the nursing home dedicated to short-stay care, raising capacity to 80.  We revamped the therapy process as part of this demonstration program, introduced electronic medical records, and joined a growing movement called “culture change,” which places the nursing home resident at the center of care, with staff and caregivers working in non-traditional ways.

Compared to short-stay patients at other nursing homes in New York City, our program stands out:

-- The average length of stay at Village Nursing Home’s restorative program is now at 24.4 days, compared with the New York City average of 27.1 days.

-- Significantly, more of our short-stay program’s participants are going back home – 62 percent at Village Nursing Home’s short-stay program, compared with the NYC average of 43 percent.

And we’re serving more and more people.  In our fledgling days in the short-stay program in the 1990s, we served maybe a couple of hundred people a year.  Now, that number is around 1,400.

These are people going into the nursing home, getting the care and services they need to restore their functioning as much as possible, and then going back home.

Talk about a revolution – this isn’t at all what the traditional role of a nursing home was seen as.

What’s important to note, as I pointed out a couple of months ago, we at VillageCare are now able to serve significantly more people, with what I would say are significantly better results and outcomes, with virtually no cost increase.

That’s another part of the revolution.