‘I’ll lose everything’: Snohomish County’s only adult day health center to close

EVERETT — Each time Jennifer Humelo steps through the double doors at Full Life Care in Everett, it’s like she’s coming home.

For four hours each day, she gets to spend time with the center’s other clients, staff and service animals — her second family.

But on July 19, due to state-level funding challenges, Full Life’s Snohomish County Adult Day Center will close its doors. It’s the only adult day health center in Snohomish County.

The center on Rucker Avenue supports about 120 adults with disabilities. It provides skilled nursing, rehabilitative therapy, social work, counseling and occupational therapy, as well as social activities. Many clients are homebound, and the program can be the only chance they get to socialize.

“They are not able to go out in the community and socialize with their peers and have a normal life like we do,” said Lisa Nott, an occupational therapist at Full Life in Everett. “We’ve provided a very important outlet for them to live some kind of normalcy. It’s very unfortunate that without this service, they are going back to basically nothing.”

Humelo started going to Full Life 15 years ago so she could spend time with people during the day.

“If they shut down, I’ll lose everything,” Humelo said. “I’ll lose my bus drivers that I love, my friends, my staff. I have a big, giant, squishy heart, and I love everybody.”

Once the Everett location closes, the closest Full Life location will be in South Seattle, 32 miles away.

For the past year, the Everett location has operated at a $3 million deficit. To help bridge the deficit, the center needed increases in Medicaid reimbursement rates in the 2025-27 state budget. That didn’t happen.

Full Life’s South Seattle location is able to continue operations because King County gets a higher reimbursement rate than the rest of the state. Full Life leadership was hoping the state would address the disparity and add a differential for its Everett location, said April Hamilton, director of adult day programs at Full Life Care, in a statement to The Daily Herald. Now, Full Life can no longer continue to subsidize adult day health in Everett, Hamilton said.

“Our hearts go out to the team members and clients impacted,” she said. “Funding cuts from Washington State have had a dramatic and severe impact on our organization, and we’ve had to make difficult decisions on behalf of Full Life Care to restructure our program offerings, operations and teams to run a sustainable organization and to preserve our mission.”

Full Life Care’s parent company, Transforming Age, did not respond to a request for comment.

Since 2018, 38% of Washington’s adult day health centers have closed. Without Full Life’s Everett location, only 12 centers will remain for the entire state.

Throughout all of Full Life’s adult day health locations, 74% of clients have a mental health diagnosis and 88% have skilled care needs. Half of its clients have been enrolled for five years or more.

Full Life works with the state to connect its clients with health and social services to prevent functional decline that could place them in nursing homes, said Velda Moore, an occupational therapist at Full Life in Everett.

Art Cass started going to Full Life just over a year ago. In 2018, his wife, Kathleen Cass, started caring for him at home as his dementia progressed. But being a full-time caregiver became difficult, Kathleen Cass said. The Full Life program gave her an extra 16 hours per week, which helped maintain her energy so she could truly be there for her husband, she said.

“I don’t know that I could have made it all this time,” Kathleen Cass said, “and I’m not sure what’s going to happen.”

In the 21 years he served in the U.S. Navy, Art Cass became used to having a lot of people around.

“You take that away, and you’re in a vacuum,” he said. “You feel like there’s nobody there.”

At Full Life, Art Cass said he can let go of his worries and truly be himself. He’s become a lot more engaged since he started going to the center, Kathleen Cass said, and every day gives him a new story to tell.

“Without this place, I don’t know where I’d be,” Art Cass said. “I’d be dead.”

When the Everett center closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, 25 of its clients died, Nott said. None of the deaths were COVID-19 related, she said. Moore is worried closing the center permanently could lead to more deaths.

“Many people, without the stimulation, without socialization, they will decline and they will die,” Moore said.

For 15 years, Colby Hultman has been going to Full Life, where he’s met some of his best friends and the love of his life. He’s been going through a hard time recently, he said, as he’s been grieving his father and coping with hospitalizations from seizures. His friends and the staff at Full Life have made him feel supported.

“I like this place,” he said. “It’s like home to me. It really sucks. When they told me, I just broke down and cried.”

Full Life is working with the state Department of Social and Health Services to develop a safe discharge plan for clients, Hamilton said. The organization hopes to continue to serve its clients through its Medicaid home care and Health Home programs.

The center’s 18 staff will be out of a job come July 19. But Full Life is more than a job for them, Moore said. Every staff member has used their personal money to help a client get something they need, she said.

“We’re mostly thinking about knowing that people that we loved and serviced are going to suffer,” Moore said. “It’s bad enough to lose your job, but to also know that all the people that you love, you can’t help them anymore.”

Jenna Peterson: 425-339-3486; jenna.peterson@heraldnet.com; X: @jennarpetersonn.