If you don’t currently have a comprehensive wellness program in your senior living community, you’re missing an opportunity to keep residents active and engaged and decrease your operating expenses.
Senior wellness programs have been shown to improve physical and mental well-being and help decrease incidences of depression, improve mobility and independence, and most importantly, reduce the risk of falling. Keeping residents thriving is a great way to nurture the seven dimensions of wellness, while ensuring residents thrive in place longer. Wellness programs can also be a great tool for attracting active older adults to your community, increasing occupancy and length of stay, while preventing hospital admissions.
The return on investment for Wellness is twofold. There are direct financial benefits for introducing and maintaining a comprehensive Wellness program, including an increase or stabilization of occupancy in your community, increased length of stay for your residents, referrals to and from therapy, reduced healthcare costs, and reduced risk of falls leading to rehospitalizations among other factors. A Wellness program could also generate a direct revenue stream with membership fees, specialty classes, and personal training services, depending on how the program is structured.
Census and occupied units are critical metrics for senior living communities, so increasing length of stay is imperative. Communities with higher rates of occupancy have more revenue to support their operations, while communities with more empty units rack up costs for refurbishment, cleaning, and marketing to refill them.
Turnover is expensive for communities. Refurbishing an assisted living apartment for a new resident has an estimated cost of nearly $4,000. By keeping residents in the community longer, these costs are reduced.
For example, let’s say a community’s monthly revenue for a resident is $3,000. If that resident stays in the community for five months longer than average, the community gains $15,000 in revenue that otherwise would not have been received had that resident suffered a fall or some other decline and had to be hospitalized.
Providing a comprehensive wellness program also helps to complete the continuum of care between therapy and healthcare, and it gives residents a “next step” after meeting their goals on skilled services. Fitness testing and balance screenings get residents engaged and started on their wellness journey.
If you would like to implement a Wellness program in your community, please check out the Wellness programs Functional Pathways offers or reach out to us for a quick 15-minute call to learn more.