“Instead of patients spending time walking in bland hospital hallways, we wanted them to perform stimulating activities in a controlled rehab setting that will help them transition back into the community,” said Dr. Chris Kusmierczyk, ARC program director during his speech at the center’s Thursday grand opening. “In some ways [it will] make them feel like they’re already back in the community. We wanted them to feel one step closer to home and give them that hope and that confidence and that belief in their recovery that it was going to happen.”
The ARC provides about three hours of daily physical, occupational and speech therapy to patients who cannot return home and need a more intensive level of rehab and physician oversight than other facilities or programs can provide, according to the hospital.
It provides real-world practice rather than less realistic simulated activities, Kusmierczyk said. This includes using a walker to get through a screen door, something Kusmierczyk and director of rehabilitation Dr. Bobby Parrett added to the ARC in response to a specific patient’s needs.
“She was doing great; she was walking hundreds and hundreds of feet and she went home, and within 48 hours she fell and broke her hip and she needed to go back to the hospital for surgery,” Kusmierczyk said. “And when we debriefed that situation what happened was ... she was going through her screen door with her walker and it (the door) cam back on her, knocked her off balance. She fell and broke her hip.”
Parrett said by doing more realistic rehabilitation, staff hopes to motivate patients to better outcomes.
“We had hope that this would bring kind of a fire to them to where they’re going to do just a little bit more, be a little bit more motivated because they can kind of see a better outcome,” Parrett said. “[It’s] very easy to get caught up in a traumatic event and you start to spiral downhill when it comes to mentally and just, ‘How am I going to function the rest of my life with this?’”
The updates to the ARC were more than three years in the making, with Parrett and Kusmierczyk coming up with the idea in February 2022. at the time, they had no funding, but that changed with the help of the Mercy Health Foundation and other sponsors.
It’s the only ARC within 30 miles and the design is unique. It was in part inspired by the functional spaces at St. Rita’s in Lima, which like Springfield’s ARC, has a car and a grocery store. But Springfield’s space is the only one Kusmierczyk knows of that “incorporated and celebrated their community,” he said.
So far the redesigned ARC has seen around 450 patients, though most patients experienced the center before it was fully completed, Kusmierczyk said. Patients and employees have had only positive feedback, Kusmierczyk and Parrett said.
“People just really love it and they connected very quickly with what our vision was,” Kusmierczyk said.
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