Another Aging, Money-Losing Nursing Home Bites The Dust, Causing Displacement Of Over 70 Seniors By Thanksgiving; Significant Medicaid Cuts Impact Closure Decision

In Hutchinson, Kansas, The Hutchinson News reports:

• Staff and residents of Dillon Living Center were notified [] that the facility at 1901 E. 23rd Ave. would close its doors at the end of November.
  
  Officials blamed ongoing losses by the 96-bed assisted-living and skilled nursing home, as well as a need for $3 million to $4 milliown in building upgrades to make the facility competitive in today’s care-home market.
  
  The closure will affect 71 residents and about 70 full-time-equivalent staff, said Ken Johnson, president and CEO of Hutchinson Regional Healthcare System.
  
  “The hardest part of this decision is the burden we’re placing on our residents, their families and our staff,” Johnson said. “Moving to a new home or place of work is stressful, so our priority is to ease that transition for everyone.”
  
  The organization is planning to schedule meetings with officials from other long-term-care facilities in the community to help residents transition to new homes, Johnson said.
  
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  The home, [...] has been “sustaining very significant losses” annually for the past decade, Johnson said, including losing about $1 million per year the past two years. [...] “The industry is moving to a homelike atmosphere,” Johnson said. “We feel very much like an industrial or institutional assisted-living facility, on both sides.”
  
  While housing about 20 people in assisted living and 50 in skilled nursing, the operation lacks an independent-living segment, which helps feed new residents into the home as they transition through different levels of need, helping maintain the facility’s census, Johnson said.
  
  Recent cuts to Medicaid through KanCare by the state also have had an impact, though they are not directly the cause for the decision, Johnson said.
  
  “This decision has been in the works a long time, but significant cuts on Medicaid payments add to the prudence of the decision,” he said.

For the story, see Dillon Living Center care home closing at end of November.