Record number of Maine nursing homes closed this year, displacing hundreds
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Now, the building sits vacant. The family was forced to close the facility in late August, leaving about 85 residents and 120 employees to find new homes and jobs.
"We had some [residents] that had been there up into 20 years," Wilday said. "We had employees that had worked for us for 40 years."
"A lot of tears were shed over the 30 days we were working to close," he said
Ledgeview was one of half a dozen nursing homes that shut down in
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The difficult decision to shut Ledgeview's doors came after years of escalating financial struggles, Wilday said. While all of the residents found beds at other facilities, some had to leave the community, including one who now lives north of
"It was hard for them, it was their home," he said. "You're disrupting their home and sending them someplace that they're unfamiliar with."
Wilday, who found work with another senior living company, still finds it hard to drive by his family's former business on
Years of pressures, from underfunding to struggles to recruit staff, have caught up with the facilities housing
The personal toll of the closures on the elderly and their families is acute, said
"That's big for them, that's their life," Thorsen said.
When a nursing home closes in
In 2018, six nursing homes closed in
Collectively, just over 200 people resided at those homes when each closure was announced.
The
[A
By 2030, nearly a third of
In every instance, the owners of the facilities that shuttered this year attempted to sell before closing, Erb said.
"If those independent owners want to get out of the business, there's almost never a market to sell their facility," he said. "There's no interest."
MaineCare, the state's Medicaid program, foots the bill for most -- 66 percent -- of
But the program has underpaid nursing homes for years, according to nursing home operators.
MaineCare bumped up payments in 2014 and again in 2015, preventing an "absolute catastrophe," but nursing homes' costs escalated more, Erb said. Reimbursement policies also tend to favor larger facilities with a greater volume of residents, he said.
Now, Erb's association is calling for another reexamination of MaineCare reimbursement policies.
On average, a day of care in a nursing home costs roughly
But that's not always an option, particularly in rural areas where residents who can afford better insurance are few and far between.
Nursing homes are struggling to pay staff, resulting from a shortage of qualified workers who have leverage to demand higher salaries, and the minimum wage increase that took effect in January, Erb said. Certified nursing assistants are the "backbone of the workforce," but it's challenging to recruit them when they can find less demanding jobs in retail or other industries for comparable pay, he said.
"It's a difficult job both physically and emotionally," he said.
When nursing homes can't attract enough staff themselves, increasingly they turn to staffing agencies, which charge significantly more than the homes pay, Erb said. That not only increases the homes' costs but also means many staffers are working on a temporary basis, sacrificing consistency in residents' care.
The staffing crunch has affected the quality of care that nursing homes in
"We don't like to say that; we don't like to admit it," he said. "The staffing levels are so integral to quality care that, yes, I would have to say that it is having an impact."
Earlier this year, four
In December, the federal government announced it would cut payments to nursing homes whose patients wind up in the hospital repeatedly.
In
Still,
[When this
All six nursing homes that closed in
That's partly because fewer people are entering nursing homes in the first place, said
Another factor contributing to closures is uneven Medicare reimbursement for skilled rehabilitation care, Gallant said. Nursing homes closer to hospitals miss out on those higher payments, she said, because patients just get their rehab at the hospital before they're discharged, rather than at a nearby nursing home.
"We have spots where there may be a surplus of beds, at least at this time, and some places where there are waiting lists," Erb said. "Sometimes the rural facilities struggle. That raises the question of what do we do to preserve access so people don't have to drive 50 miles or more in order to receive the services?"
Maine Focus is a journalism and community engagement initiative at the
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