Erie County Medical Center announced the name of its new $103 million, 390-bed nursing home on the ECMC Health Campus on Grider Street, which will open in February. The new long-term care facility will be called "Terrace View Long-term Care Facility," based on the design feature of multiple terraces that provide residents with wide-ranging views.
Terrace View replaces the 80-year-old Erie County nursing home in Alden. Terrace View also combines in one location existing long-term care beds from ECMC.
The move from Alden to ECMC's Health Campus focuses on providing higher quality, state-of-the-art care for residents. It also moves residents closer to family, increases access to employment for Buffalo and suburban residents, and reduces operating costs for ECMC Corp. Transport costs the 16 miles to or from Alden cost $900,000 a year.
"Moving our county home residents to a new, modern facility at ECMC benefits residents, our employees and provides better, more efficient care," said Jody L. Lomeo, ECMC's CEO. "We're especially pleased that residents will move to a fresh, state-of-the-art facility that incorporates the very latest in resident-centered thinking. The terraces are an important aspect of providing a comfortable living environment for the residents."
The new home is organized into small-scale, 12-bed households, each with living room and fireplace, kitchen and dining rooms. Each floor features a generous outdoor terrace and an indoor terrace lounge with a view to the terrace below.
Terrace View, designed by Cannon Design, and the centers of excellence are part of a five-year, $200 million in expansion on ECMC's Health Campus that when complete will provide good-paying jobs and health-focused economic development centered in a section of Buffalo that has seen too little of both.
Terrace View will also be one unified replacement for two existing long-term care sites ECMC currently operates, making space on the hospital's fifth and sixth floors for additional treatment areas.
Consolidation provides efficiencies and gives residents immediate access to medical care at the adjacent medical center. In the other direction, it will also permit convenient hospital discharges directly to the long-term care home. The new facility was designed to provide a supportive environment for the resident-centered delivery of care model ECMC developed.
The existing facility at ECMC contains 126 skilled nursing beds and 10 ventilator beds. The nursing units in that 40-year-old facility mimic the acute care nursing units above and below and provide an institutional environment for residents. The current facility in Alden holds 586 beds on three floors.
The new facility, for which current residents had design input, is 275,500 square feet on five levels, plus a mechanical room on the top of the building. It contains three floors of 96 skilled nursing beds each; one floor containing 66 sub-acute rehab beds; a 20-bed ventilator unit and 16-bed behavioral intervention unit on the ground floor, for a total of 390 beds.
In line with New York State Department Health recommendations, there will be a 332-bed reduction to the new facility from the current total of 722 beds.
The building will be connected to the existing hospital and to other facilities on campus via a public corridor that will be used to transport nursing home residents in need of medical care, to the new dialysis unit and to the hospital, as well as the reverse.
Seems like a smart use of resources and land for the hospital. Consolidation of this type is necessary.