Countywide : Home to Be Altered for Long-Term Care

The Ventura County Health Care Agency has announced that it will provide funds to convert an Oxnard board and care home into a long-term residential facility for the mentally ill.

Grady’s Residential Care Home will receive about $290,000 a year in county and state funds, enabling it to hire additional staff and house patients who would otherwise live in secured facilities, Mental Health Services Director Randall Feltman said. The home, which now houses 12 semi-independent mentally ill people, will begin the conversion immediately and should be fully converted in the next two months, Janet Grady said.

Grady’s Residential Care Home was chosen to help meet the growing need in Ventura County for highly supervised board and care facilities because it is an existing facility, Feltman said.

“The issue we usually run into when trying to find a site for a board and care home is ‘Not in My Back Yard,’ ” Feltman said. “What we have done in this instance is taken a good, existing board and care home and turned it into a better long-term residential treatment site, rather than go into someone’s neighborhood and open a facility some people may not have wanted,” he said.

Feltman said spending county money on the conversion was economically sound. Housing the 12 mentally ill patients who will move into Grady’s in locked facilities could cost the county more than three times as much, he said.