Orem care center gets new look

OREM (Deseret News) — Sitting in his room at the Orem Nursing and Rehabilitation Care Center, 86-year-old Vernon Nuttall likes to watch the construction going on right outside his sliding glass door.

The jackhammers are fun to watch, but he enjoys seeing everything the workers are doing to modernize the 50-year-old building he has called home for the past year.

Nuttall was one of many patients who watched Tuesday as five people invested in the building broke ground where the new 3,000 square-foot, state-of-the-art rehabilitation gym will be built.

The company in charge of the construction, Ensign Group, started leasing the building a year ago. The group is based in California and has 80 buildings nationwide with six in Utah and three more being acquired in the state by the group in the next month, said Derek Squire, area president of Ensign Group.

Ensign Group has already begun remodeling the rooms in the Orem care center for both short-term and long-term patients. After the remodel, each patient will have a private room and the facility will be able to serve 13 more patients at a time, said Aaron Ernest, operations manager for Ensign.

Nuttall has watched the remodeling of the garden area for the past several weeks and will watch out his window Wednesday as the concrete is poured for the new path.

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