<\/p>\n
St. Peter\u2019s Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, located at 301 Hackett Blvd. in Albany, plans to close by June 30.<\/p>\n
Will Waldron\/Times Union<\/p>\n
ALBANY\u00a0\u2014 After nearly seven decades of business, the official\u00a0closure of St. Peter\u2019s Nursing and Rehabilitation Center<\/a> in Albany is imminent, and it comes with a mass relocation of employees and patients.<\/p>\n According to a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification<\/a>, or WARN, posted on March 25, St. Peter\u2019s Health Partners reported 133 of its 188 employees at the time had been affected by the closure.\u00a0The nonprofit health network announced the closure in early March<\/a>, citing it cannot afford to shoulder the $60 million in upgrades the aging building requires.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Executive Vice President of Continuing Care Michelle\u00a0Mazzacco 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\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n 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\u2019s.\u00a0There are \u201chundreds of vacancies\u201d across St. Peter\u2019s,\u00a0Mazzacco said.\u00a0According to the National Library of Medicine<\/a>, facilities offering long-term care, such as St. Peter\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWith today\u2019s health care worker shortages, (affected employees) really have their choice of where they want to go,\u201d\u00a0Mazzacco said.\u00a0\u201cMaking sure that transition is good for everybody has been a key focus for the whole team.\u201d<\/p>\n Make the Times Union a Preferred Source on Google to see more of our journalism when you search.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Add Preferred Source<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n 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,\u00a0according to the state Department of Labor<\/a>.\u00a0WARN Act regulations<\/a> require businesses to provide all employees with 90 days’ notice prior to a plant closure or mass layoff, with exceptions including \u201cunforeseeable business circumstances.\u201d<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n St. Peter\u2019s Health Partners expects to close its Nursing and Rehabilitation Center by June 30,\u00a0Mazzacco said. She said\u00a0the health network is ensuring all residents are transferred to new facilities by the time of closure.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re not planning to be closed until the end of June at this point,\u201d Mazzacco said. \u201cWhat\u2019s happening is, as residents are leaving, then gradually we\u2019re able to allow our staff who have accepted jobs within our system to transition to their new site earlier.\u201d<\/p>\n The center, located at 301 Hackett Blvd. in Albany, opened in 1958 as Villa Mary Immaculate. For nearly seven decades, it\u00a0was \u201chome\u201d for patients receiving subacute and long-term care, including Albany resident Marsha Penrose.<\/p>\n \u201cThis was a wonderful place to recover, and I think it\u2019s a terrible loss for the people in Albany,\u201d Penrose, who received short-term treatment at the center, told the Times Union in late March.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n 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\u2019s, transferring to one of its six other nursing homes. St. Peter\u2019s conducts weekly check-ins with those who have moved to new sites,\u00a0Mazzacco said.<\/p>\n \u201cWe can feel good that they\u2019re going where they\u2019d like to go,\u201d Mazzacco said. \u201cWe have to remember that they\u2019re older, and moving when you\u2019re 80 or 90 is different than moving when you\u2019re 20. That gives us a little added sense of wanting to go above and beyond\u2026 this is a big deal to go to something entirely new.\u201d<\/p>\n St. Peter\u2019s\u2019 other nursing homes include two in Troy and one each in\u00a0Slingerlands, 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.<\/p>\n \u201cBy and large, everyone has made their choices, and they\u2019re just waiting for their bed to become available,\u201d Mazzacco said.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n As the facility was aging, it was also facing \u201ca steadily declining\u201d occupancy rate,\u00a0Mazzacco said. When the closure plan was announced,\u00a0<\/p>\n out of the 160 beds available at the center, just over 60% were occupied, she said.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n \u201cWhile 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,\u201d Mazzacco said during the community meeting last month.<\/p>\n As for what will happen to the center\u2019s building following its closure,\u00a0Mazzacco said St. Peter\u2019s plans on \u201cmaintaining it in an empty state at this point.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"St. Peter\u2019s Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, located at 301 Hackett Blvd. in Albany, plans to close by June…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":611300,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[122692,28,97,252,253,20835,3729],"class_list":["post-611299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health-care","tag-alco","tag-business","tag-health","tag-health-care","tag-healthcare","tag-latest","tag-local"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/611299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=611299"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/611299\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/611300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=611299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=611299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=611299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n