Somerset Place closes, many residents transferring to other facilities

Last week, following the loss of state funding, Somerset Place in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood closed its doors.  The nursing home had been the subject of a number of Chicago Tribune articles which detailed the many problems the troubled nursing home had providing quality care to its residents, including many resident-on-resident assaults and other nursing home care deficiencies.

The nursing home served exclusively the mentally ill, and some of the residents are being transferred from the nursing home to group homes and other structured environments.  However, many of the other residents are being transferred to other area nursing homes.

The bulk transfer of many residents from a troubled nursing home does not bode well for the facilities accepting transfers from Somerset Place.  There are a number of reasons for this:

1.  The residents will be arriving all at the same time.  That means that the resources of the accepting facilities will be stretched beyond capacity as they try to assess the new arrivals and integrate them into the new facility.

2.  The residents coming from Somerset are coming from a facility where unacceptable behavior toward one another and the staff was fairly routine.  It will certainly take time for these residents to unlearn those behaviors and how to conduct themselves in an appropriate manner toward staff and residents in their new homes.

3.  The staff at the new nursing home will not know each of the residents they are now assuming care for.  There is a certain amount of institutional memory that helps with nursing home care which allows nurses to know when someone is not at the usual baseline condition.  All of that memory is lost with the closing of the facility.

4.  When residents are transferred to a new facility, they are at increased risk of accidents due to disorientation and confusion and simply not being familiar with the new nursing home. 

Somerset Place was a nursing home that badly needed to be closed.  It was a perfect example of what is wrong with much of how nursing home care is provided in Illinois today.  However, suddenly closing the doors and sending residents en masse elsewhere is not the smart or safe way to transfer the Somerset residents.