Starting at 8 a.m. on a beautiful Wednesday, 12 vans began moving residents of Centre Crest nursing facility in Bellefonte to their new home, Centre Care Rehabilitation and Wellness Services in College Township.
The new $45 million facility, located on Persia Road off of Benner Pike, welcomed residents for the first time after about five years of planning and a year and a half of construction.
“It’s a great home for us and the new people that come in,” Charlie Myers, president of the facility’s Residence Council, said. “I think we’re going to be happy with it.”
With a capacity of 240 beds, the new 135,000-square foot Centre Care facility is about twice the size of the 83-year-old Centre Crest on East Howard Street. A central building is flanked by two wings and in addition to traditional long-term care, it has three specialty “neighborhoods” for memory care, high acuity care and short-term rehab. It also includes an on-site dialysis suite and a larger therapy gym.
Plans for the new facility were first announced in 2017 by the nonprofit Centre Care board, which took over operations of Centre Crest from the county in 2013. With an aging building that would require exorbitantly expensive improvements to meet state codes, and with no room to expand, the board decided after 20 months of strategic planning that a new “home for the county” would be needed.
“We all made a commitment that we had to find a way to build a replacement facility, not only for the residents…but for the future of Centre County,” said board member Larry Bickford, who was a county administrator at the time of Centre Crest’s last addition and renovation in the early 1990s. “We consider this the county’s home. That’s what we call it. We take people from all over the county of any financial ability. It’s the commitment we made to not only the current but future residents that this is the place for you if you need it despite your financial conditions.”
According the Pennsylvania Department of Aging, 21% of Centre County residents age 60 or older have an annual income of less than $17,655. Centre Care is the largest facility licensed to provide Medicaid care in Centre County.
To make the new building a possibility, the nonprofit received a $34 million direct loan from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and has raised more than $4 million from public and private donors.
Each resident room is about 100 square feet larger than at Centre Crest and offers an entry hallway to provide more privacy. The number of private rooms increases from four to 66.
Also new: each resident has a television and, except in memory care, their own phone line.
In the old building, residents could bring a TV if they had one.
“Seventy to 75 percent of our residents are Medicaid residents,” Centre Care Board President Betsy Boyer said. “Some of them don’t have the funds to have a TV. So now everyone in the building has a TV of their own that they can watch, using a senior cable network.
“We did not have phones for the residents in the rooms because it was an 80-year-old building and it wasn’t set up to do that. Each resident having their own phone with a direct line is huge for our residents.”
The new building also has amenities such as a large multi-purpose room, bistro and chapel.
Boyer noted that the facility has an isolation area should any residents test positive for COVID-19. However, virtually every resident has now received both doses of the COVID-19 vaccine and more than 80% of staff are vaccinated, she said.
Set back on 30 acres, Centre Care also has about quadruple the outdoor space of Centre Crest. It offers four gardens and outdoor courtyards, including one just outside the therapy gym where Centre Care plans to add outdoor therapy equipment in the future. One courtyard is being developed specifically for memory care patients.
Each dining area has access to outdoor space, with patios and courtyards on the first floor and balconies on the upper floors.
“Our next phase of making this building complete is that we’ll be working on the gardens,” Boyer said. “They are there but we want to enhance them. That’s the next phase of this project is to make them very accessible for residents and to let the residents tell us what they want to do in each of those garden areas.”
Outdoor space is one of the things Myers said he is most excited about, adding that he’s looking forward to horseshoes, badminton and croquet as well as more opportunities for the residents’ garden club.
“It will be exciting to get out and do things,” Myers said. “There’s just more room to do them. Down there [at Centre Crest] we didn’t have the room.”
Boyer said that in the future the larger facility will offer more employment opportunities as well. Currently, Centre Care employs about 285 people.
With a maximum capacity of 240, Centre Crest budgeted for an anticipated 224 residents. But because of COVID-19 and the reluctance of families to transition loved ones to nursing facilities, the current census is 140.
“It’s at least twice the size of [Centre Crest]. We have the new units like the dialysis, like the high acuity that’s not offered anywhere else in Centre County,” Boyer said. “We will [add staff] as we need to do that.”
The new facility — which Bickford said was delayed in completion by only about two months because of both COVID and heavy rain — sits on 15 acres, leaving another 15 for Centre Care to expand in the future and provide more living options.
“That’s going to be developed into personal care, assisted living, maybe some apartments,” Bickford said. “We will not start that until we have financial stability on this facility.
“We did marketing studies and we have planned what you would call a total commitment of care. If you want to be on the premises, and want to start in an apartment, you can start in an apartment. Then if you need assisted living you can enter assisted care where you have an apartment but you have food service, laundry and nursing. Then as you progress as you need skilled care you can move here. It becomes a community you can live in for as long as you care to.”
The future of the old Centre Crest property, meanwhile, is still unknown. Centre County retains ownership of the building and land and leased it for $1 a year to Centre Care. In 2018, Bellefonte Borough Council approved rezoning the property from R-4 to R-2, though the county has announced no plans for the building.
Centre Care staff will continue cleaning out the Bellefonte building this month.
For Boyer, the new facility marks a new era for senior care in Centre County.
“Centre Care is brand new and we’ve added a lot of things to this facility that we could never have done at Centre Crest,” she said. “Centre Crest has always had a bit of a stigma to it, in that it started as ‘the poor house’ and we’re hoping this takes all of that away and residents who need care, need a home, need some place to be will feel that is exactly what we’re offering and that stigma is gone. “The new name is Centre Care Rehabilitation and Wellness Services and that is what all of this facility provides.”
