Sentara Home Care Services Assumes Ownership of Bath Community Hospital Home Care and Hospice 

Effective July 1, 2009

Norfolk, VA – July 7, 2009  –  Sentara Home Care Services is pleased to announce it acquired ownership of Bath Community House Home Health and Hospice of the Highlands on July 1, 2009.

Under its new name of Sentara Highlands Home Health, the agency will continue to serve the counties of Bath and Highlands Virginia in home health services, while adding new programs in the future. “We are very pleased to welcome the employees into our home care family and honor the Bath Community House and Hospice of the Highlands rich history of being one of the nation’s first rural visiting nurses programs that dates back to 1913. “We are excited about providing the same compassionate, high-quality and cost-effective services their home care and hospice agencies have provided in the Bath and Highlands region,” according to Ray Darcey, Vice President, Sentara Enterprises.

Focus on home care
“We are proud to work with such a well-established, award-winning healthcare system,” said Debbie Lipes, Bath Community Hospital’s CEO. “Sentara Home Care Services has a great reputation throughout the state. They are experts in what they do because their sole focus is home health care.”

“This merger is a win-win situation for everyone involved,” said Lipes. “Sentara has hired our home health employees with the same benefits and the same vested years of service. Making sure our employees were taken care of was very important to the administration at Bath Community Hospital.”

Sentara offers the same services provided by Bath Community House Home Health, such as physical therapy and skilled nursing care, with the addition of personal care and infusion therapy, which is the administration of intravenous medications. Wound care nurses, specially trained in all types of wound and ostomy care, are also available as consultants to patients.

Sentara Home Care launched a telehealth program in several of its branches in eastern Virginia a couple of years ago that will allow nurses to conduct virtual visits to patients’ homes, in addition to regular home visits. This service helps manage chronic illnesses and can help determine if a patient’s condition is worsening in order to avoid re-hospitalizations.

“Our goal is to eventually offer this service in all our branches,” said Sabine Brent, regional director of sales and marketing for Sentara Home Care Services.

Sentara Home Care Services is a mid-Atlantic home care agency headquartered in Chesapeake, Virginia with additional offices in Williamsburg, Hampton, Suffolk, Richmond, Charlottesville, Covington and Elizabeth City, North Carolina.

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