Sitting in the Homeland Center’s 1950s-themed diner, Andrea Fisher said some people see health care as a job, but Homeland staff stay for years because they “are here for the residents.”
At the next table, a staff member on break said, “I’m down with that. Today’s my 28th anniversary here.”
“Are you serious? That’s amazing!” Andrea marveled. “That’s what I mean. She’s here for the residents. She’s not here for herself. People here genuinely care for the residents. You see everyone talking to the residents. You see them helping residents if they need something. It’s different because people want to be here, and that makes a huge difference.”
Andrea joined Homeland as director of therapy in spring 2025. Before that, the native of York – where she still lives – worked at facilities in Pennsylvania and Maryland. When a former colleague alerted her to an opening at Homeland, she immediately recognized it as “night and day” compared with her previous employer.
“I liked that it’s clean,” she says. “You could tell by the way the staff interacted with each other that they’re a team. Patients seem to be well cared for. It had a completely different vibe when I walked in the door.”
Andrea decided on a career in therapy after her grandmother had a stroke but, sadly, received appalling care at a facility.
“There has to be something better,” she thought. A friend suggested she major in occupational therapy, and she graduated from Penn State Mont Alto in 2000. The job suited her need to work with people instead of sitting at a desk – a trait she learned when her first job out of high school had her working at a computer all day, designing gymnastics costumes.
“I used to get in trouble because I’d walk around and talk to people, so that’s how I knew I needed to be around people,” she says.
While Homeland’s therapy typically concentrates on skilled-care residents, Andrea is trying to build relationships with personal care residents. She hopes they feel comfortable seeking out therapy that can help them “be safer in their apartments and be behind closed doors at a safer level.”
“It’s telling them that we’re being proactive instead of reactive,” she says. “A lot of people just need a little fine-tuning, and they’re good to go.”
To build that trust, Fisher started leading twice-weekly, 30-minute exercise classes, often with a fun twist. Personal care residents have played balloon volleyball, “which they love, aggressively sometimes.” A scavenger hunt sent residents around to stations where they answered health or history trivia questions and got snacks, then ended with lessons in stress relief.
In her role, Andrea stresses communication and keeping residents, family, and nursing staff informed. Homeland’s Restorative Nursing Program, which works closely with her team to help residents stay active and maintain their progress, is the first she’s seen that “actually seems successful and runs appropriately,” she says. “It’s encouraging to see.”
Working closely with the Homeland Activities Department — for instance, to organize the scavenger hunt — has been another revelation compared to other facilities.
“Our focus is to keep people as active as we can keep them,” she says. “We want them to be as mobile and in the least restrictive environment as possible. Everyone works together really well.”
Outside of work, Andrea is mom to a 14-year-old son and boy-and-girl twins nearing their 11th birthday. They all play sports, so fall is “crazy time.”
“We have baseball tournaments every weekend, and soccer games every weekend. Practices every week. My daughter plays basketball. She goes to lessons. That’s what I do.”
They take family vacations to Long Beach Island, NJ, every July, and sometimes go there in the spring or fall to walk the island’s wildlife refuge, where they find shells and sea glass “because no one goes out there then.”
Homeland has shown Andrea that health care can be delivered in a team environment – “that everyone works together. It is possible when you have people who actually buy into it and care about the residents. I love this team. It’s like a family here.”
