New ownership, same award winning care

KELLOGG ­— The nationally recognized Kindred Nursing and Rehabilitation- Mountain Valley center will now be known as Mountain Valley of Cascadia.

The change happened on the first of this month when renowned care center made the switch in operators.

Cascadia, based out of Eagle, Idaho, is a fairly new corporation that was started in 2015.

The company acquired all seven of Kindred’s facilities in Idaho.

Recently, Kindred made the decision to divest all of their skilled nursing facilities (SNF’s), so they sold them to BlueMountain Capital Management in July of this year for $700 Million. At that time, Kindred’s current SNF portfolio spread across 18 states, and included 89 nursing centers with 11,308 licensed beds and seven assisted living facilities with 380 licensed beds. The SNF has been under the Kindred umbrella for 21 years, and in that time has won several awards, including the prestigious Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award just this past year.

BlueMountain has operators in every state, this means that following their acquisition of Kindred, the facilities were transitioned under that state’s operator- which is Cascadia in Idaho.

The real win out all of this is that nothing is really going to change for the facility itself, something that Mountain Valley executive director Maryruth Butler is very pleased with. “All our current employees were given job offers at the same rate of pay,” Butler said. “Everything we have has Mountain Valley on it, so keeping our name was very big for us.” Cascadia, despite being the new owners, will be integrating all of Kindred’s policy and procedures since Kindred’s SNF had proven themselves to be such a high performing company.

“The seven former Kindred facilities in Idaho won’t see much change,” Butler said. “But the current Cascadia facilities will see change as they transition up to what we are doing now.”

There were no rate increases for residents and policy will remain the same, but Butler believes that more localized ownership could make a night and day difference in the way her facility operates.

“For us in the State of Idaho, we like to think we do things a little bit different than other states do, just as evidenced by the states that we’re surrounded by who have little bit different thinking than Idaho,” Butler said. “To have owners and operators in the state of Idaho who understand the uniqueness about Idahoans and even the differences between Southern and North Idaho that we expect to see that an Idaho owner will recognize that.”

Mountain Valley of Cascadia is located at 601 W Cameron Avenue and can be reached at 208-784-1283.