Retirement community continues expansion in Roanoke County

Friendship Retirement Community will expand its rehabilitation services in Roanoke County with a new $13 million, 73,000-square-foot-facility.

The company said Thursday that work will begin soon on Friendship Health and Rehab Center South located at 5647 Starkey Road. The new facility will offer 120 private rooms. A groundbreaking ceremony will be held at 3 p.m., Sat. Aug. 2, and will include remarks from Virginia Sen. Mark Warner.

Turner-Long Construction Co. will serve as the general contractor. Construction is expected to take about 18 months, with completion in the fall of 2015.

“We are excited to be able to bring this level of rehabilitative care to Southwest Roanoke County,” Russ Barksdale, president and CEO of Friendship Retirement Community, said in a statement. “This means that the citizens here and in the surrounding areas now will have access to the highest level of rehabilitative skilled nursing care available without having to leave the area.”

According to the company, demand for on-site, patient rehabilitation has outgrown Friendship’s 373 beds available in the company’s current space on Hershberger Road, already the largest in Virginia. “This new facility will give us the room we need to better serve our patients,” said Sue Devine, administrator at Friendship Health & Rehab. “So many can’t wait to get out of a hospital setting, and while this will still be an inpatient facility, we want to help those acute care patients make quick recoveries so that they can go home sooner and restart their lives.”

Friendship Health and Rehab offers skilled and immediate nursing care, sub-acute care, inpatient physical, speech and occupational rehabilitation, memory care, psychiatry and palliative care.