Faxton St. Luke’s Healthcare has received a $31.3 million state grant to improve its long-term-care services with a focus on keeping more seniors in the community and out of nursing homes.
The state grant is the largest in the hospital’s history, officials said. It is the second largest of the $150 million in grants announced by the state last week.
The grant will be used to:
ä Renovate St. Luke’s Home so that the inpatient acute rehabilitation unit can be moved from the hospital’s Faxton campus to the nursing home. This will make the Faxton campus a strictly outpatient facility.
ä Construct a new building on the St. Luke’s Home site to house Faxton’s community-based long-term-care services, including an expanded adult day health program, the Visiting Nurse Association and Senior Network Health, which provide medical services and case management to seniors in their homes. The new building will be connected to the nursing home.
ä Add an eight-station outpatient dialysis unit to the new building for use by patients in the nursing home and community members, alleviating a countywide shortage of dialysis units.
These projects will expand care options for area seniors and their families, said Lori Calabrese, Faxton’s grant writer.
“It’s really finding alternatives to having a senior citizen in an adult facility such as a nursing home,” she said. “It’s trying to keep seniors in their homes and let them age in place with all these different services. We’re changing the face of long-term care.”
Project planning started Friday, the day after the grant was announced, and construction should be completed within two years, officials said.
Seniors age 85 and older are the fastest growing group in the state, increasing by 25.5 percent between 1990 and 2000, according to Calabrese. The number of seniors age 75 and older rose 15.4 percent during the same period, she said. In Oneida County, seniors make up 16.3 percent of the population, according to Calabrese.
“We are very excited about the opportunity that this grant provides our community,” said Steven J. Brown, Faxton’s senior vice president and chief operating officer. “With a growing number of people age 65 and older in Oneida County, in the near future we will see a greater need for health care services. Through this transformational (grant), we will make efficient and effective changes to our system to meet their needs.”
Currently, patients at St. Luke’s Home have to be transported to another facility for dialysis, but that will change once the new building is built. “Just imagine a frail elderly individual in the dead of winter having to be loaded into a van to be taken somewhere else for dialysis treatment. So this is huge,” Calabrese said.
The new building also will allow Faxton’s adult day health program -- which provides a safe and social daytime environment for frail seniors, often while a caregiver works -- to expand by at least 10 slots, Calabrese said.
The other services in the new building — Visiting Nurses and Senior Network Health – provide seniors with health-care services, such as registered nurses, home health aides and physical therapists, in their homes.
And Senior Network Health provides clients in Oneida and Herkimer counties with a care plan and lines up services, including ones Faxton does not provide, such as eye exams, housekeeping services, durable medical equipment and nonemergency transportation.
The grant was awarded by the state Department of Health and the Dormitory Authority of New York State through Phase 20 of the Health Care Efficiency and Affordability Law of New York State, or HEAL NY, and the Federal-State Reform Partnership.
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