BEMIDJI — One has worked in health care for more than four decades. One is known for her warm presence that helps residents feel welcome. Another strings up thousands of Christmas lights around the facility each holiday season.
Each of these Neilson Place employees, along with the hundreds of other staff, volunteers and residents the nursing home has seen over the years, were celebrated as the long-term care facility commemorated its 20th anniversary with a program on Tuesday.
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The building, located on the campus of Sanford Health’s Woods Edge retirement community, consists of three long-term care neighborhoods and one rehabilitation therapy neighborhood.
As part of the program, Sandy Benson, the facility’s former administrator who played a crucial role in opening it two decades ago, shared some key milestones from her journey working to bring the Neilson Place vision to life.
In the 1990s, Benson was a part of the leadership team at North Country Nursing and Rehab Center, located downtown along Bemidji Avenue.
“It was a small group in the beginning that went on the adventure,” she said. “There was a tagline that we had … we were weaving timeless connections, and that was a big part of what we were trying to do.”
The team may not have known it back then, but their dedication would eventually lead the center to become Sanford Health’s Neilson Place. At the time, all they knew was that changes were underway at the center.
“A change had happened on our acute care side of our operation, and they had the opportunity to put together a new unit that would help people who are having surgical interventions, chronic illnesses, anyone who needed to have care from rehab services,” Benson said. “This change in delivery of rehab services became a perfect time for us as staff to work together to decide, ‘Where are we going now? What will we be?’”
The first step in determining the direction of the center was to build a team of experts who could help understand what its residents wanted and needed.
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After learning valuable insights on long-term care from a group that included physicians, a geriatrician, a dietician and a social worker, Benson and the leadership team felt they were ready to take the next step in developing a facility that would offer more amenities and services to the people who called it home.
“Gone were the days of living in a care center where you were in a double room, where you shared a bathroom, where you were in a large communal dining room,” Benson said. “Life was relatively routine and spontaneity was kind of rare. Access to green space was limited. Pets were not always welcome and interactions with children were not a regular part of daily living.”
A new home
After plenty of brainstorming and behind-the-scenes work, by the early 2000s, it was determined that a new building would be constructed adjacent to the North Country Regional Hospital on 1000 Anne Street.
With the move came a new name for the facility. Established with support from the George W. Neilson Foundation, the building’s namesake is attributed to Katharine Neilson Cram, who served as the foundation’s executive director until her death in 2000.
Once Neilson Place was built in August 2004, everything was moved from the downtown building to the new facility in a matter of just two days. To accomplish this feat, 39 residents and all their belongings were moved across town each day.
Facility operations manager Chuck Jensen remembers the move fondly.
“It seems like it was just weeks ago when we brought the residents from the downtown building to this building to tour it and pick out their rooms,” he said. “Those residents were able to pick their rooms and pick their new home.”
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Jensen noted that the new building, which is about 20,000 square feet larger than the downtown facility, offered more space and privacy for residents with its 78 single-occupancy rooms.
“(The downtown building) was definitely a product of the 60s and that era and what nursing homes were then,” he said. “It was 46 resident rooms and 32 of those rooms were double occupancy, which meant there were two beds, two people in each of those rooms, and those rooms were about 250 square feet. That’s not big.”
Once the dust had settled from the move, staff worked to make residents feel at home in the new space with a focus on creating a sense of community within the facility.
“Life at 1000 Anne Street slowly took on its own rhythm,” she said. “There were organizational meeting spaces, there was entertainment, picnics, resident and family dinners, lots of different ways that the community could come in and be with us again.”
Now, as Neilson Place enters into its third decade, Benson expressed her gratitude for those who helped bring the vision to life and the staff who still dedicate their time to the home’s residents.
“I’m not sure that those of us who began could believe that we’d still be on this journey 20 years later. Here we are, but we want to thank all of you, leaders and heroes who joined the journey and the adventure along the way,” she left off. “We not only did it, you’re still doing it today.”
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