Drake Center: Specialized Medical & Rehabilitative Care

Therapeutic Courtyard and Patient & Family Pavilion

As the Tri-state’s premier provider of rehabilitative care, Drake Center constantly strives to enhance its services and improve the quality of patients’ lives. Two unique additions to Drake Center’s campus are the Friedlander Therapeutic Courtyard (outside Level AR, South Pavilion) and the Patient & Family Pavilion (outside the Dining Room, Level 1, West Pavilion). These two outdoor areas provide:

  • Invaluable additional opportunities for patients’ therapeutic and social activities.
  • A home-like setting to aid in a patient’s transition from the hospital to the community.
  • The natural rewards of a beautiful, serene, outdoor environment.

Friedlander Therapeutic Courtyard

The Friedlander Therapeutic Courtyard is a fully accessible, non-smoking outdoor therapy area where patients can rebuild and strengthen a variety of skills in a beautiful and serene environment. The familiar activities they perform provide added realism and motivation.

These activities are supervised by Drake Center’s clinical team — physical, occupational, speech, and recreational therapists and other rehabilitation specialists, including the cardiopulmonary team and psychologists. The Courtyard is also available to Drake Center patients for independent use, if medically permissible.

Key features of the Courtyard include:

  • Walking paths - with five segments to let patients practice walking and using wheelchairs and other assistive devices on surfaces encountered in the community, such as brick, gravel, wood decking, mulch, and sand.

  • Planter boxes - allowing patients to practice gardening in two large, fully accessible, raised planting beds.

  • Shuffleboard court, basketball court, and miniature golf green - offering valuable opportunities for building physical, thinking/memory, and other skills.

Patient & Family Pavilion

The Patient & Family Pavilion is another beautiful, peaceful, and functional outdoor therapeutic setting designed to enhance patients’ quality of life.

A fully accessible, non-smoking area, the Patient and Family Pavilion provides various opportunities for therapeutic, physical, and social activities. It also serves as a secluded, informal gathering place — for patients and their families, as well as for a range of enjoyable, supervised patient functions.

Special features of the Patient and Family Pavilion include:

  • Tactile gardens - surrounding the area, they feature year-round flowers and plants native to this region. Specially designed planter beds are raised and fully accessible to patients who can walk and those in wheelchairs.

  • Covered areas - with open sides that provide shelter and shade as needed, they allow visitors to enjoy the outdoors and fresh air.

  • Walking path - covering the entire circumference of the Patient and Family Pavilion, this provides opportunities for walking and wheelchair practice.

  • Enclosed picnic grill - available for patient and family activities as appropriate. Donated in honor of a Drake Center patient, the grill is enclosed in stone for maximum safety.

  • Tables/furnishings - user-friendly, they are available for individual and group patient activities and for informal patient and family visits.