Atria Puts Turnaround Skills To Work In Transformation Of Former Holiday Portfolio

Atria Senior Living has put considerable resources into improvement, exemplified by the operator’s turnaround of its portfolio of communities formerly operated by Holiday Retirement.

In 2021, Atria acquired the senior living management company Holiday Retirement. In 2024, real estate investment trust (REIT) Welltower (NYSE: WELL) transitioned 89 former Holiday by Atria communities to a half-dozen regional senior living operators with 67 Holiday by Atria communities under Atria control today.

Atria has a set of benchmarks for all aspects of a community’s operations and schedules unannounced audits from an internal group of directors at the company led by Chief Quality Officer Sean Purser. The team uses a standardized playbook to improve resident safety, quality of care and general operations.

“This is just ingrained in what we do and it helps us guide everybody across all communities to follow these certain standards,” Purser told Senior Housing News.

Applying the quality enhancement program to these Holiday by Atria communities helped the company’s staff improve occupancy and overall quality enhancement scores by 30 basis points, representing a needed shift in operations, culture and standards, according to Purser. To acclimatize to the process, executives gave Holiday by Atria communities roughly six months to adopt new standards and culture.

Some of the standards measured include cleanliness, environment and operational consistency. According to Purser, Holiday by Atria quality enhancement scores now match or exceed other communities’ scores in Atria’s portfolio. This is also in part due to the low acuity nature of Holiday by Atria communities, Purser added.

To improve a struggling community, quality enhancement teams focus on 10 to 20 indicators that match consistency in operations to resident satisfaction. These efforts helped pull Holiday by Atria communities from lagging and low-scoring communities toward a portfolio that is more in line with Atria’s current performance.

“It has become an integral part of their workday and a natural extension of their routine. Since adopting it, we have seen their scores improve dramatically,” Purser said. “We want them to be excited and proud to show off how well they’re going to do on quality.”

At each community, quality enhancement directors audit each department across the set of standards to determine areas where a community needs to improve, spanning dining to resident programming. Community staff have a set of benchmarks they can track to improve operations, Purser said.

To promote engagement and buy-in from staff, a bonus structure is set up at each community based on quality enhancement successes and makes the process “like a treasure hunt,” Purser said.

For example, staff identify resident maintenance issues or other community needs and bring them forward for review on a rolling basis with regional directors overseeing reviews and updating areas for all communities to focus on. The company ties quality enhancement metrics to training modules for staff to understand various aspects of operations, Purser added.

“It took a while to buy into the culture of quality culture, and getting there for our team, we had to change how we did a lot of things,” Purser said.

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