CONTRIBUTED CONTENT — A sense of purpose and quality of life should be maintained at any age. With this in mind, the South Dakota-based Primrose Retirement Communities is excited to open their first senior living community in Utah comprising 86 apartments in Washington City.
At Primrose residents will enjoy the privacy of their own spacious apartment, with access to artisan dining, a nurse available 24 hours a day and calendar full of hobbies, events and new adventures.
The Washington City location is currently accepting reservations for assisted living and memory care apartments, as well as independent living townhome villas, and will start welcoming residents in the spring of 2021.
Adam Jones, regional sales and marketing manager, said that “community” isn’t part of their name by accident.
“At Primrose, you feel a part of a community,” he said. “We really get to know our residents, from their hobbies and interests to their favorite foods, and it feels like a family, not just a retirement community. It feels like home.”
The Primrose story
In the late 1980s, there were not many options for taking care of loved ones during their later years. There were nursing homes, and of course, a parent could move in with their adult children. However, many people were living alone, and after leading lives that included various careers, raising families and leaving their mark on the world helping others, they deserved something better.
In an interview with Aberdeen News, Primrose founder and CEO Jim Thares said he felt like his grandfather was one example of someone who was just sitting around and waiting to die. He knew the younger generation could – and should – do better, and he made it his personal ambition to change what people expected from senior care.
“I thought, ‘Shame on us.’ Here are people that have been productive in life and raised families and had jobs, and they still have life to live,” Thares said. “We need to do a better job of fulfilling them in their later years in life.”
Over 30 years later, Primrose continues to enhance the lives of seniors, growing from its first independent living community in Aberdeen, South Dakota, to 41 communities across 18 states employing over 1,600 people. Utah will be its 19th state.
Primrose specializes in personalized services and high-quality, resident-focused care, recently adding memory care apartments for those living with Alzheimer’s disease and other types of dementia. Their mission is to create happy and healthy living environments for seniors, no matter what a person’s current health condition may be.
Jessi Weldon, director of sales and marketing for Primrose, said one of the reasons for their success in memory care comes from looking at the situation from a different perspective.
“We make sure our staff is trained to go to where that person is, (to) kind of live in that person’s reality versus expecting them to live in our reality. That’s never how it should be,” Weldon said in the Aberdeen News article. “We should be able to change our ways to best meet what that person’s needs are at any stage in their journey.”
Primrose’s director of operations, Dylan Kessler, echoed this sentiment.
“Our philosophy is a person-centered care approach, so how do we do it the right way every time for that person, and recognizing it’s not going to be the same for everyone,” Kessler said. “Every resident we have and every resident we serve is the most important person to someone. And that often gets lost in certain areas of health care, but it’s very much on our minds.”
Primrose broke ground on its new Washington City facility in August 2019. The multimillion-dollar project includes 44 assisted living apartments, 26 memory care apartments and 16 townhome villas. Westland Construction oversaw the project, financed by Plains Commerce Bank.
Thares said that even with the company’s decades of growth and expansion, they still have work to do, adding that since they are based out of the Midwest, values like hard work, respect and accountability are evident in their services.
“If we still have the opportunity to change lives or impact lives in a positive way, we’ll keep doing what we’re doing,” he said. “I guess I still feel like there’s still a lot of (people like my grandfather) out there.”
For more information about Primrose Retirement Communities and the new Washington City facility, visit their website.
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Resources
- Primrose Retirement Communities | Address: 5190 S. Washington Fields Road, Washington City | Telephone: 435-565-4186 | Website.
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