State details plans for Va. Beach veterans center
The state’s planned nursing home for veterans in Virginia Beach is on track to open in the spring of 2022, the Veterans Care Center Workgroup reported.
The $68.6 million, 128-bed facility on 25 acres in the Princess Anne section of Virginia Beach adjacent to Nimmo Parkway (extended), West Neck Road and N. Landing Road will reflect a new approach to long-term care for veterans, the work group said in a report to the General Assembly.
Instead of the semiprivate rooms at the state’s first veterans care center in Roanoke, or the private rooms off long hallways at its second facility in Richmond the Virginia Beach center is intended
to feel less institutional.
Rooms in Roanoke and Richmond are organized in 40- to 60- bed units. Those centers operate large, central dining halls.
The Virginia Beach center, and another new facility in Fauquier County, will be organized in smaller, 16-bed units, with private bedrooms and bathrooms and a shared living room and dining room.
While Roanoke and Richmond have sets of 60- and 40-bed units for veterans with Alzheimer’s or dementia, Virginia Beach plans a more flexible approach, so that any of its 16-bed units can serve such residents, depending on need. A quarter of its rooms will be oversized, to facilitate care of obese residents.
Plans call for a nursing staff of 1 2 5 .4 full-time-equivalent posts, so that there will be one certified nursing assistant for every eight residents and one licensed professional nurse for every 16 residents during days and evenings. Nighttime staffing will be one CNA to 16 residents and one LPN to 32 residents.
For the t wo-month shakedown period after the center opens in 2022, it will have six residents. After that, it will admit about 10 new residents a month.
Wit h an expected discharge of two residents a month, the plan is to fill 95% of its beds in the 17th month after opening.
The center should be breaking even financially by month 19.
The state Department of Veterans Services’ plan is to support operations until then with working capital advances — a draw against expected future revenue.
But it warns that it could take some time before the center is financially healthy enough to begin significant repayments of those advances.