SAN ANTONIO -- San Antonio’s newest long-term care facility looks nothing like a nursing home. It’s a model of care that makes the senior experience quite different.
This is not your grandma’s nursing home. The Mission at Air Force Village features households, not hallways and nursing stations, and homey rooms for residents like 83-year-old Russ Swansburg, a retired Air Force colonel who lives here now with his wife of 60 years.
“We were in a sick place,” Swansburg said. “Now we’re in a well place.”
“This is not your typical nursing home,” explained Wendy Carpenter, executive director of AV Healthcare Operations. “This is an environment in which our residents, their dignity will be protected. Their individualism will be celebrated.”
Each small group of seniors shares a homelike kitchen and dining area and a shared living room space. Some even care for a community cat.
The Mission offers usual senior fare like Bingo and a hair salon, but it also features a state-of-the-art rehabilitation facility where both short-term and long-term care patients can get the medical help they need to recuperate, recover and function as well as they can as long as they can.
“Our seniors are one of the most vulnerable populations,” Carpenter commented. “And they deserve this type of environment in which to live out the rest of their life.”
Research has shown less institutional, more home-like care leads to better physical and psychological health for seniors. Swansburg, who tends a flower garden on the porch, agrees.
“It’s too bad a lot more old people couldn’t live like us,” he added.
The Mission cost $22 million. It’s got room for 80 people. They accept Medicare patients, military and civilian.
