A Co Mayo nursing home is to close after four decades in business as it is no longer financially viable to continue to operate, with its management criticising a wider “underfunding” of the sector.
St Anne’s, a 26-bed nursing home in Charlestown, is the 24th care home to close in the last 18 months, as voluntary and privately run facilities struggle to cope with funding shortfalls, high inflation, as well as the cost of meeting strict regulations.
Director of nursing Karen Dewsall said staff and residents in St Anne’s had been told this week that the home would be closing.
Funding problems
“There was staff in tears, families in tears, residents saying they won’t leave; it’s really rough,” she told The Irish Times.
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Fair Deal, the scheme under which the State funds beds in private and voluntary-run facilities, in exchange for a portion of residents’ income or assets, is “not fit for purpose”, she said.
Private and voluntary providers, who comprise about four-fifths of nursing homes, have complained funding from the scheme has not kept pace with the increasing costs of providing care. St Anne’s had received an increase of up to €40 a week per resident in Fair Deal funding, which Ms Dewsall said was not enough to cover “massively” increasing inflation.
“Oil, food, heating, supplies, everything has had a major impact. Every month we’re fire fighting,” she said. “The funding hasn’t kept in line with changes ... We feel very let down. It’s heartbreaking,” she said.
A Health Information and Quality Authority (Hiqa) inspection last November said the home was compliant across 10 out of 13 regulations, describing the facility as a “small homely” centre.
Staff in the facility were “very loyal”, meaning there was a low turnover and residents saw a familiar face each morning, said Ms Dewsall. “This nursing home hasn’t been about profit for a long time, it’s been about survival,” she said.
If funding and other issues were not addressed smaller nursing homes in more rural areas “are just going to disappear”, she added.
Many residents in the home who had lived there for years are now facing the huge “upheaval” of having to move to another home, she said. “The staff have said, ‘I know we moan a bit, but we don’t want to go because we’re like a family’,” she said. “Should this home be closing down? Absolutely not.”
St Anne’s was opened by Kathleen Smyth and her late husband Vincent in 1983. Ms Smyth, who is in her 80s but still the registered provider of the home, is “devastated” at this closure, said Ms Dewsall.
The nursing home sector and particularly smaller individual establishments, are in a “state of emergency”, she said.
There is a lack of “joined-up thinking” between the State agency funding beds under the Fair Deal scheme, the National Treatment Purchase Fund, and healthcare regulator Hiqa.
Fire safety works
Instructions from Hiqa for necessary improvements to buildings or fire safety works, which could cost up to €10,000, would be beyond the means of a “small, underfunded” nursing home, she said.
Chief executive of Nursing Homes Ireland Tadhg Daly, which represents private and voluntary providers, said the Fair Deal funding system was the “root cause” of many recent nursing home closures. “To say it hasn’t kept pace with inflation is an understatement,” he said.
Mr Daly said alongside struggling smaller nursing homes, larger groups running multiple facilities were also privately worried about the “future viability” of the sector.
