Damakant Jayshi
A month after shutting down the Community Corner Clubhouse, North Central Health Care will move its Adult Day Service program to the facility in Wausau.
The ADS program will move to its new location at 811 N. Third Ave. on Nov. 15, Mort McBain, the interim executive director of NCHC, told the Marathon County Health and Human Services Committee on Wednesday.
“That wasn’t always our plan but actually it turned out to be a pretty good plan,” McBain said, adding that the NCHC crew is cleaning up the building to ensure the space is ready. At present, the day service is being provided at the NCHC campus.
Unclear is when the officials from the NCHC, the North Central Community Services Program or the NCCSP Board made the decision to move the program from NCHC campus to the former venue of the Clubhouse. But it was apparent that clients using the ADS program and their families had been informed of the move at least before the meeting on Wednesday since a committee member shared an email from the family of a current a client who had written to him about the change.
The Community Corner Clubhouse officially shut down on Oct. 15, one year after celebrating its 25th anniversary.
McBain said some people may not immediately approve of the new venue, as change is hard for some clients. The people who use the services are cognitively and physically disabled and need daytime care, McBain said. Most cannot work and likely receive Supplemental Security Income. The SSI program “provides monthly payments to adults and children with a disability or blindness who have income and resources below specific financial limits.”
The ADS program will have 70 people at a time using the entire space – upstairs and downstairs, he said. As a comparison, the interim executive director said, the number of people who were at the Community Corner Clubhouse at the same time rarely exceeded 15 and sometimes as few as six.
For every eight clients using ADS, there will be one staff taking care of them.
The only concern, McBain said, was traffic around Third Avenue; consequently, they will use paratransit buses for drop off and pick-up.
Supervisor Ron Covelli shared an email from one client’s family that spelled out several concerns including the availability of American Disability Act-compatible bathrooms, respect for privacy, opportunity for outdoors experience and parking at the premises. The family also wanted to know how the NCHC staff would monitor the clients.
McBain said clients are taken on trips to give them outdoors experience, and that will continue. There are three bathrooms and two of them are ADA-compatible, with plans underway to partition off a changing space to create more changing room to address privacy concerns.
McBain responded to the concerns by saying that all bases have been covered and that the Clubhouse space will be ideal for the new use.
