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In an effort to ease the nation’s looming shortage of skilled-nursing-care facilities, the Los Angeles Jewish Home for the Aging — the largest single-source provider of senior residential care in the Western United States — dedicated its new building on Oct. 29.

The innovative center is one of the most comprehensive and sophisticated facilities of its kind in the country.

“This is … without question one of the most important developments in care for the elderly in Los Angeles in the last decade,” said Molly Forrest, chief executive officer and president of the facility. “Despite the need to care for the nation’s growing elderly population, it is extremely rare that anyone in the last 20 years has built new facilities such as this.”

The center is home to a 10-bed acute psychiatric hospital with 239 beds dedicated to skilled-nursing services.

The Joyce Eisenberg-Keefer Medical Center is the manifestation of the Jewish Home’s vision of breaking from the longstanding and outdated models of eldercare institutions. “Buildings from the ’50s and ’60s simply weren’t designed to meet today’s demands of senior care,” Forrest said.

In that spirit, the center will incorporate a host of breakthrough designs, such as distinctive groupings of individual rooms to create smaller and easily identifiable resident community “neighborhoods.” A beauty salon and spa, computer centers, deli, and creative arts studios have all been integrated into the center and are intended to reflect the Home’s philosophy of offering programs to nurture and enhance the body, mind and spirit.

An interdisciplinary team of healt-care professionals supports residents with medical, psychiatric, psychological and rehabilitative services.

According to Dr. Rick Smith, the Jewish Home’s medical director, combining medical with cognitive rehabilitation therapies, nutrition and support services will create a “special holistic healthy-aging center representing the way medicine should be — doing our best to ensure quality of life and care now.”

The center will also be home to the Brandman Research Institute, which will encompass the 10-bed inpatient acute psychiatric hospital as well as research, education and treatment programs.

Founded in 1912, the Los Angeles Jewish Home for the Aging is the largest single-source provider of senior housing in Los Angeles. Each year, nearly 1,000 women and men are sheltered in two village campuses spanning 16 acres, with independent-living “Neighborhood Home” accommodations, residential care, skilled nursing care, Alzheimer’s disease and dementia care, and hospice.

Further information regarding the facility can be found at www.jha.org or at (818) 757-4407.