St. John's nursing home and URMC expand collaboration to free up space and add services

Two area health care organizations are combining forces to help increase the number of available beds in both a nursing home and two local hospitals.

St.John’s nursing home and the University of Rochester Medical Center are working together in that effort.

It involves having URMC help St. John’s fill more staffing positions so that they can accept more patients from Strong and Highland Hospitals. That in turn, would free up acute care beds for patients at those two hospitals.

Charlie Runyon is President and CEO at St. John’s. He said the nursing home has space for more residents, but there is a need for more staff so that they can accept more patents from the two hospitals.

“We have enough beds, we just don't have enough staff to staff the beds we have,” said Runyon, “so that's really the issue that has kind of taken hold. “Those beds that are offline are rooms that are empty. But with some creative opportunities, hopefully we can get some of these folks back into nursing homes where they're more appropriate.” (in terms of where the patients are being cared for).

Kathy Parrinello is the Chief Operating Officer of URMC and she said URMC will help recruit staffers for the nursing home so that St. John’s can accept more residents.

“It also then frees up beds here at Strong and at Highland for all the acute patients, the patients that have illnesses that need to be managed right away, those patients who might come to our emergency department, come and have surgery here, they’ll be able to get a bed on a patient care unit much more quickly,” said Parrinello.

The arrangement between St. John’s and URMC, builds on a longstanding relationship between the two health care organizations.

This latest iteration also involves adding some medical services on the St. John’s campus, including a dialysis unit which would be staffed by personnel from URMC. Officials from both organizations said that will benefit dialysis patients who won’t need to leave the nursing home to travel to various locations where they can get dialysis.

The latest collaboration also calls for St. John’s being able to add some services involving skilled pediatric care which will help provide another setting for children needing advanced services, but who Parrinello said may be in a better situation if they can be moved out of the hospital.

Officials from the two health care organizations did not detail what kinds of financing is involved in this expanded collaboration, but indicated the amount of funding needed involved a “modest investment” by URMC.

The process of adding services will be done in a phased-in approach, with some assistance beginning very soon, while other work, which also involves regulatory approvals, will take somewhat longer to implement.