The nation’s two largest long term care trade organizations will join operations, the American Health Care Association and the Alliance for Quality Nursing Home Care announced Tuesday.

The newly formed group will retain AHCA’s name on the letterhead and will be led by AHCA’s current chief executive officer and president, Gov. Mark Parkinson. Announcing the agreement Tuesday, Parkinson said that long term care providers are “at a crossroads.”

“The economic straits our profession faces necessitated this union,” he said in the statement.

Parkinson’s group has set new membership records over the past 18 months, and the streamlined, new organization will help ensure that “there is no equivocation in our message to Washington,” Parkinson said.

“Combining the efforts of our two organizations will make our profession stronger than it has ever been,” Parkinson said.

Alliance President Alan Rosenbloom hailed Parkinson’s “strong leadership, vision, and dedication,” which Rosenbloom said “has helped bring focus not just to our profession’s unique funding challenges related to both Medicare and Medicaid, but to the real, metric-driven successes in quality improvement.”

The groups expect operations to be fully joined by July 1, Tuesday’s announcement said.