Troubled Chicago nursing home loses funding

Somerset Place, the troubled nursing home located in the Uptown neighborhood, is losing Medicare and Medicaid funding and may be forced to shut its doors, which would cause the roughly 300 residents of the facility to have to find new nursing homes.  The loss of funding follows a series of articles in the Chicago Tribune which brought the nursing home into an unwanted spotlight.

The nursing home houses many mentally ill residents, including approximately 66 convicted felons.  The Tribune articles depicted a facility where the residents were out control, behaving violently toward on another, the staff, and in the community.  According to the article which reported on the loss of funding, the staff claimed that they were short-handed and lacked support from the ownership of the facility, and even though management was trying to correct the problems, the staff believed that it would revert to its prior form as soon as the regulators were gone.

Some of the residents interviewed for the article were upset about the possibility of being forced into other facilities with a shuttering of Somerset Place.  From one perspective they are right:  many studies have shown that moving residents from facility to facility does have some detrimental effects on the well-being of the residents, as they tend to become disoriented in the new facility and lose the benefit of a certain amount of experience in caring for them.

From another perspective, families of nursing homes near Somerset Place, especially those with large numbers of empty beds, should be upset also:  the residents from Somerset Place may be coming to your parent's nursing home -- and in large numbers -- and they will be bringing their own set of problematic behaviors that the staff at the new facility is not aware or or necessarily prepared to cope with effectively.

My prediction as to what will occur when and if Somerset Place is closed:  many of those residents will be moved to nearby facilities, especially ones that have large numbers of empty beds, and within six months, you will see increasing problems in the nursing homes that accept these residents in the form of resident-on-resident assaults and a decline in  the quality of care that other residents receive, leading to an increase in things like nursing home falls and/or the incidence of pressure ulcers.

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