SHELBY — After nearly a century of service, Shelby Home & Public Health has officially closed its doors.
The non-profit home health agency officially closed for business on March 2 – just shy of its 99th anniversary after incorporating on May 21, 1919. The decision to close was made on Jan. 1.
Closing has been quite the adjustment for business manager Dana McMichael and quality assurance nurse Laura Burrer. The women have been with Shelby Home & Public Health for 23 and 21 years, respectively.
“I’m taking it one day at a time,” McMichael said.
As the name suggests, Shelby Home & Public Health was focused primarily on home healthcare, providing home care to help patients live comfortably as they recovered from an illness or injury. For 30 years the agency also provided public health services in partnership with the city of Shelby’s Health Department.
However, things started to change for Shelby Home & Public Health when the city decided to terminate its public health contract with the agency five years ago.
“That probably started the downfall,” McMichael said.
As a non-profit agency, Shelby Home & Public Health received its funding from Medicare and Medicaid clients, a small grant through Richland County, and the United Fund of Shelby. Losing the public health contract with the city was a major financial blow.
“It was a big deal when the contract was lost,” McMichael said. “Some people in the community might have supported it, but many of them were against that.”
An increase in competition also complicated things for Shelby Home & Public Health. According to McMichael, Ohio is one of the largest states for home-care agencies, with more than 300 of them across the state.
“Every year there’s new home-care agencies opening up,” McMichael said. “You’re talking home-care agencies located in Toledo or Cleveland and they satellite through the whole state of Ohio. They have traveling nurses that are living in this area serving these counties up here even though their home office may be in Columbus or Cincinnati.”
Locally, the competition grew fierce. Two local hospital systems introduced home-health services that steered clients away from Shelby, and many doctors that recommended Shelby’s services either moved their practices or retired.
Ten or 15 years ago, Shelby Home & Public Health served 65 clients or more. In the last five years, those numbers have dipped anywhere from 36 to below.
“We’re just too small of an agency to keep surviving,” McMichael said. “It doesn’t matter if you have one employee or 16 employees, your expenses are always the same. It’s costly to stay up with all the recommendations and policy changes and new programs put in effect.”
“We were nonprofit so there was no cost to the client,” added Burrer. “A lot of agencies are for-profit. That’s who we were and what we were founded on, and we didn’t want to change that.”
McMichael and Burrer watched as Shelby Home & Public Health’s role in the community grew smaller and smaller. But its history remains the same; during the devastating flood in 2007 the agency provided tetanus shots to emergency workers, and in the 1970s gave shots to students in all the schools when immunizations became a mandate.
“That’s one of the things that’s sad for us because we know that history and we know what we did,” Burrer said. “Anybody would call and we would be there.”
The news of the agency closing was “heartbreaking” for its local clients, according to Burrer. It’s been even harder for Shelby Home & Public Health employees.
“This was a very honorable place to work, and it’s very hard to keep your values and what you think you’re supposed to do in nursing and go elsewhere, because sometimes it’s all about the bottom line,” Burrer said.
“You become a family after all these years. We are so grateful for the community that did support us.”
