Hope Center: Therapists Encourage Healing

Hope Center for HIV and Nursing Care on University Avenue in the Bronx is a highly-respected four-star 66-bed skilled nursing facility that receives HIV patients plus those who have struggled with drug and alcohol addictions. Although the majority knows that this is the place in the Bronx for these folks to get well, it is the facility’s short-term rehabilitation therapy department that faces these challenges because the patients here are not the “everyday” or common nursing home residents, rather they are those who have everything from strokes and depression to due addiction, to falls and infections. It is the job of these therapists to get these folks up and out of their wheelchairs and inform and re-informing them that they can go back to their lives, but better off and clean. Three Hope Center residents are pure examples of overcoming such obstacles.

64-year-old Bronx native Nelson Alves had an unfortunate incident on his birthday back in July of 2020. Mr. Alves was walking in his kitchen when he slipped and hit his toe under the sink where his toenail came off and ultimately got infected. He went to Lincoln Hospital where the nurses told him to make sure the area stayed clean and although he tried hard to make sure of that, Nelson acquired gangrene where the doctors needed to amputate his left leg above the knee. Later, he went to Metropolitan Hospital in Manhattan for Rehab for prosthesis, following that he went to University Nursing Home in the Bronx and from there to Hope Center, admitted in January 2021.

As seen on Washington Heights-Inwood Patch