Rehabilitation and other skilled nursing care is more than the sum of its expenses—more than the 100 days of post-hospital supervision that you’re entitled to under your Medicare coverage.

So, if you’ve been thinking of skilled nursing care as just another painful step on the road to recovery (or the last stop before a nursing home), think again.

Smaller can be better.

We’re starting to see more and more rehabilitation and skilled nursing care centers in the US abandon the traditional institutional setting to take up a person-centered approach.

“You are seeing more ‘small house’ nursing facilities across the country,” says Emerson Stambaugh, Administrator of the Deupree Cottages. “And there are some communities retrofitting existing nursing homes to create household groups within a large building.”

While the personalized, homelike nursing care facilities are starting to catch on across the United States, Deupree Cottages still offers the only community of its type in the Greater Cincinnati area. In fact, when we opened the Deupree Cottages in June of 2009, we set the bar for skilled care in southeastern Ohio.

The private rooms in our 2 cottages are built around a home-like hearth room with an open kitchen, den, library and spa room so our residents never feel isolated during their stay.

Not all skilled nursing is created equal.

The Deupree Cottages—and other communities like it—are reimagining the gold standard of skilled nursing for both rehabilitation care and more permanent residents. With an unparalleled commitment to Person-Centered Care that shatters eldercare stereotypes, the Deupree Cottages are showing older adults in Cincinnati just what skilled nursing care should look like.

The Deupree Cottages’ Medical Director, Dr. Jason Graff, believes that skilled nursing care is about more than how a provider approaches therapy or how fast they get a patient back on their feet, but about the experience a patient has within the skilled care facility.

Graff believes that patients can only truly recover their health in a place where they are happy, so the licensed caregivers at the Deupree Cottages take an approach that treats patients as the valuable and unique individuals that they are.

“Patient-Centered Care takes a look at each individual and their needs, coming up with a comprehensive plan to help them function at their highest level and add quality to their lives,” Graff said in an interview for ERH’s Linkage magazine. “It’s a focus on the individual’s needs and not the needs of the facility.”

Residents have the freedom to set their own schedules—choosing when they get up, go to bed, bathe,  and eat. This approach to skilled nursing care removes the sting of indignity from eldercare while promoting independence and quality of life, and it fits perfectly with the volumes of medical research that a better care experience translates into healthier patients.

New approaches to skilled nursing are improving the standards of eldercare.

In the last few decades exercise among older adults in America has sunk to a new low while weight and nutritional problems have risen, and Graff doesn’t think that it’s a coincidence that then number of dementia-type diseases, like Alzheimer’s, are also on the rise.

“A great deal of research points to inactivity as the No. 1 risk factor in every disease process,” Graff says. “For dementia, physical activity is the No. 1 treatment available. We used to think people couldn’t form new brain cells. We’ve learned that’s not true. Research shows that through exercise people undergo neuronal changes that involve the growth of new brain cells and thus improving cognition.”

And here at the Deupree Cottages, Dr. Graff has been developing new techniques to help prevent and treat memory loss through exercise.