682 NURSING HOMES AND RETIREMENT HOUSING In recent years, some demographers have suggested that given current usage patterns, the United States needs to open one new 100-bed nursing home each day just to keep up with demand. The over-age-85 segment of the nation’s population is the fastest-growing age group, and the average age of residents in nursing facilities today is around 82. Furthermore, a greater percentage of the elderly age cohort now needs nursing home care because of increases in the mobility of adult children, in two-wage-earner households, and in divorce rates. The once common three-generation household has become rare. Thus, the odds of a person’s living alone in later life have risen dramatically, and this factor is the main predictor of one’s need to enter a nursing or retirement home. In former years, elderly care facilities in the Northern Kentucky region were government run. Each county, as required by early state legislation, was responsible for its indigent poor and elderly people, who were placed in the local county home, specifically the county farm, where the county fiscal court provided for elderly citizens as well as orphans and people who were physically or mentally ill. Often called the local “pest house,” these facilities were actually farmlike settings where the residents grew their own produce and raised their own livestock. In the 1870s Mason Co. began referring to its “pest house” as the “county infirmary.” Such facilities have been recorded in Maysville; in Bracken Co.; in Campbell Co., first in Alexandria and later in Highland Heights; in Kenton Co., at Latonia and along the Covington and Lexington Turnpike, just south of Covington’s city limits; and in Owen Co., just southwest of downtown Owenton. At least two of these government-run care operations evolved into modern skillednursing facilities: in Latonia, the Kenton Co. Infirmary became Rosedale Manor, and in Highland Heights, the Campbell Co. Home (infirmary), renamed Lakeside Terrace, operated until it was closed in 2006.
Boone Co. Infirmary, 1918.
For elderly military veterans, the U.S. Veterans Administration operates a 64-bed nursing facility in Fort Thomas, the Veterans Administration Medical Center. In the late 1940s it replaced the short-term convalescent hospital (nursing home) for U.S. Army Air Force personnel that operated for a short time at the Fort Thomas Military Reservation, just after World War II. A similar facility existed briefly in the former resort hotels of Fort Thomas just after World War I (see Altamont Springs Hotel; Shelly Arms Hotel). Other federal or state-run nursing homes that care for Northern Kentuckians are located in Dayton or Chillicothe, Ohio; Anderson, Ind.; and in Wilmore in Jessamine Co., Ky. Modern skilled-care and intermediate-care nursing homes operate in all the counties of Northern Kentucky today. These homes, participants in the Medicaid and Medicare programs, had to obtain a certificate of need from the Kentucky State Health Department in order to build and operate. Health planning, an idea born of the 1960s, limits the beds available under the federal programs in a given county based upon the county’s population of individuals over age 65. This measure represents an attempt by the federal government to contain costs. Gone are the many small 15-to-25-bed nursing homes operating out of former residential houses, structures not built to accord with modern construction or fire-prevention standards. Along Highland Ave. in Covington is a large former skilled-nursing facility that offers only retirement housing today. Developed by former Campbell Co. judge Andrew J. Jolly in the 1970s as Geriatrics Inc., this multistory concrete structure, at 300 beds, was once the largest nursing facility in Kentucky. Its startup was marred with politics, lawsuits, and trouble, but it eventually became the St. John Nursing Home. In recent years, following another period of flux and name and ownership changes, this nursing home became a part of Baptist Life Communities, a group noted for its quality
management; however, the facility no longer provides licensed skilled nursing home care. Retirement housing denotes a lower level of care, provided to residents who on average are somewhat younger than nursing home residents. They live in apartments, rather than two to a room as is common in a nursing home. Retirement housing facilities may be operated by proprietary or nonprofit groups or by government entities. The federal government, in conjunction with local nonprofit sponsors, has constructed several HUD (Housing and Urban Development) independentliving housing projects for seniors in Northern Kentucky. Examples include the Golden Tower and the Panorama Apartments in Covington (both designed by architect Carl Bankemper), the Grand Tower and the Saratoga Apartments in Newport, Colonial Heights in Florence, and Parkview Manor in Williamstown. Residents’ rent is subsidized so that they pay no more than 25 percent of their income in rent, which includes utilities. Only housing and a small number of activities are provided; residents do their own cooking. Baptist Life Communities operates independent-living units next to its Village Care Center in Erlanger. Congregate and assisted-living housing are types of retirement housing that provide other levels of care. In congregate housing, at least one meal per day is included in the monthly charge; assistedliving arrangements usually offer three meals each day and general care, in contrast to the skilled or intermediate care of nursing homes. The federal government does not subsidize congregate or assisted-living housing. Examples in Northern Kentucky include Colonial Heights in Florence (a facility of the Retirement Housing Foundation of Long Beach, Calif.), which offers assisted living in addition to independent living; Griesser Farm in Burlington, a Baptist Life Communities facility offering independent living plus; Brighton Gardens, developed and first owned by Marriot Senior Living but now owned by Sunrise Senior Living, along Turkeyfoot Rd. in Edgewood; and the two facilities of Atria Senior Living of Louisville in Kenton Co.: Summit Heights in Crestview Hills and the Matt Toebben–built Highland Crossings in Fort Wright. The latter is near the St. Charles Care Center, which also offers a similar level of care. Many local nursing homes are beginning to offer a small number of independent-living units on their grounds. A recent trend in Northern Kentucky has been the establishment of hospices, which provide care for the terminally ill either at home or in a separate facility. Within the past 10 years, the Hospice of Northern Kentucky, an affi liate of the Hospice of the Bluegrass, has opened in Fort Thomas at 1463 Alexandria Pk. Its patients are cared for at home, in other long-term-care facilities, and in hospitals such as the nine-bed unit it operates within St. Luke Hospital East. A similar facility has recently opened on the campus of the St. Elizabeth Medical Center in Edgewood as a result of a $2 million gift from the Ralph Haile/US Bank Foundation. It is Northern Kentucky’s fi rst freestanding hospice, with room for 16 patients.