Cottage-style nursing and rehab care coming to Rockmart
Groundbreaking held for first of its kind facility in Georgia focused around homestyle care at The Cottages at Rockmart
The week got started off in Rockmart with officials getting right down to business as the first shovel of dirt was moved on a project several years in the making.
Expect construction for The Cottages at Rockmart to be completed before year’s end for the new skilled nursing and rehab community that looks to bring to Polk County a new way of providing skilled care for the elderly.
Reliable Health Care Management is developing the property at 750 Goodyear Ave.
It is a development in Polk County that’s a long time coming for the co-owner of the new facility.
“I’ve been working on this for six or seven years, and especially the last five years we’ve been really trying to make this happen,” Andrew Morris of Reliable Health Care Management said.
The Cottages at Rockmart is a new standard in the state for elder care, one focused around designing for both providing for the health needs of residents while also keeping them in a comfortable environment that looks a lot like home, he said.
“There’s not any around here,” Morris said. “I’ve been studying what’s called the household model and culture change for probably about seven years now.
He traveled as far away as Wisconsin, New York and the Carolinas to find facilities that matched the vision he had in mind.
“It works beautifully,” Morris said. “The residents seem to be happier, they have a greater will to live, and they have a greater amount of participation in their care. They get things done for them on their schedule rather than the staff’s schedule, because it’s much smaller homelike atmosphere.”
The typical layout of a nursing home is usually centralized in one location, with all the people within cared for by staff, taking meals in dining rooms, activities and the like within a single large building divided on the inside by rooms.
Instead of that model, The Cottages of Rockmart will divide residents in the 116 bed facility into 8 households, each containing private rooms with their own bathrooms for each resident. So instead of elderly patients going to a dining room to eat with others on a schedule, they have instead the freedom to get up at their own pace and go to a smaller kitchen like they did at home.
They’ll still have the same level of care, he said.
The idea is to drive resident’s lives toward what it was like at home – mainly being in the social areas of a home or the kitchen – instead of keeping to their rooms.
Families won’t have to go through a check-in process when they come to visit either, and it will feel more like pulling up to the family homestead in a neighborhood than a true facility.
“They’ll go ring the doorbell at the front door just like they were going to someone’s home,” Morris said.
He said the idea was to give residents more dignity as they continue in their elder years and need greater amounts of help and care on a full time basis.
“It gives them more meaning,” he said.
At present, Morris operates Cedar Springs Health and Rehab with 62 residents receiving care. All of those will get to move into the forthcoming facility, leaving an additional 54 rooms that will be available for new additions to the cottages.
Morris expects once construction finishes before the end of 2019 – he’s hoping for a 10-month timetable to complete the development – the Cedartown facility will be closed up.
“We may sell that to someone for another purpose,” Morris said.
The eight residential building and an administrative building were designed by Christopher Baldwin of Baldwin Architectural Group of Atlanta. Van Winkle Construction of Atlanta will be the lead contractor on the project.
The latest development brings more expansion along the corridor around the Nathan Dean Bypass in Rockmart which Mayor Steve Miller said continues growth begun more than a decade ago.