St. Peter’s Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, located at 301 Hackett Blvd. in Albany, plans to close by June 30.
Will Waldron/Times Union
ALBANY — After nearly seven decades of business, the official closure of St. Peter’s Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Albany is imminent, and it comes with a mass relocation of employees and patients.
According to a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification, or WARN, posted on March 25, St. Peter’s Health Partners reported 133 of its 188 employees at the time had been affected by the closure. The nonprofit health network announced the closure in early March, citing it cannot afford to shoulder the $60 million in upgrades the aging building requires.
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Executive Vice President of Continuing Care Michelle Mazzacco told the Times Union on Monday out of the 133 employees listed on the WARN notice, 92 have accepted new jobs within the St. Peter’s Health Partners healthcare system, 27 are still deciding whether to accept offers and 14 are leaving altogether (retiring or have accepted new jobs outside the health care system).
Many of the 55 employees not included in the WARN notice are in the process of choosing whether to accept in-network offers or look elsewhere, according to St. Peter’s. There are “hundreds of vacancies” across St. Peter’s, Mazzacco said. According to the National Library of Medicine, facilities offering long-term care, such as St. Peter’s Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, struggle with retaining and recruiting staff. It cites concerns over pay and high stress levels as contributing factors to high turnover rates.
“With today’s health care worker shortages, (affected employees) really have their choice of where they want to go,” Mazzacco said. “Making sure that transition is good for everybody has been a key focus for the whole team.”
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The New York State WARN Act requires businesses to provide early warning of closings and layoffs. It applies to private businesses in the state with 50 or more full-time employees and covers closings affecting 25 or more full-time employees, according to the state Department of Labor. WARN Act regulations require businesses to provide all employees with 90 days’ notice prior to a plant closure or mass layoff, with exceptions including “unforeseeable business circumstances.”
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St. Peter’s Health Partners expects to close its Nursing and Rehabilitation Center by June 30, Mazzacco said. She said the health network is ensuring all residents are transferred to new facilities by the time of closure.
“We’re not planning to be closed until the end of June at this point,” Mazzacco said. “What’s happening is, as residents are leaving, then gradually we’re able to allow our staff who have accepted jobs within our system to transition to their new site earlier.”
The center, located at 301 Hackett Blvd. in Albany, opened in 1958 as Villa Mary Immaculate. For nearly seven decades, it was “home” for patients receiving subacute and long-term care, including Albany resident Marsha Penrose.
“This was a wonderful place to recover, and I think it’s a terrible loss for the people in Albany,” Penrose, who received short-term treatment at the center, told the Times Union in late March.
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Of the 101 long-term residents living at the facility when the closure plan was announced, just under 40 are still living there, Mazzacco said on Monday. She estimates around 60% of residents who already moved have remained in-network at St. Peter’s, transferring to one of its six other nursing homes. St. Peter’s conducts weekly check-ins with those who have moved to new sites, Mazzacco said.
“We can feel good that they’re going where they’d like to go,” Mazzacco said. “We have to remember that they’re older, and moving when you’re 80 or 90 is different than moving when you’re 20. That gives us a little added sense of wanting to go above and beyond… this is a big deal to go to something entirely new.”
St. Peter’s’ other nursing homes include two in Troy and one each in Slingerlands, Cohoes, Guilderland and Clifton Park. Each has occupancy rates generally in the mid to upper 90% range, Eddy Nursing Homes Vice President Sandra Sullivan Smith said during a community meeting about the closure of the center in late March.
“By and large, everyone has made their choices, and they’re just waiting for their bed to become available,” Mazzacco said.
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As the facility was aging, it was also facing “a steadily declining” occupancy rate, Mazzacco said. When the closure plan was announced,
out of the 160 beds available at the center, just over 60% were occupied, she said.
Mazzacco said prospective residents and families told staff they were looking for private rooms and modernized spaces, with 1,000 people turning down bed offers at the center within the past year alone.
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“While no point in time and no number of residents will ever be a good time to (close), we have the fewest number of residents that we would be impacting than at any time in the past,” Mazzacco said during the community meeting last month.
As for what will happen to the center’s building following its closure, Mazzacco said St. Peter’s plans on “maintaining it in an empty state at this point.”