The slow death of nursing homes

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The residents, staff and supporters of the Tracy Nursing Home celebrated a bittersweet anniversary this year. The home's 40th year will be its last. Nienty-nine year old resident Agnes Seykora is sad to see it go.

"It's a beautiful place and its been kept up. And it's a shame that it's being closed. I don't know what they're going to do with it," says Seykora.

Seykora has lived in the Tracy Nursing Home about a year. She was one of about 30 residents in the home when the closure was announced a few weeks ago.

Twin Cities based Tealwood Care Centers bought the nursing home's license. That gets the company all the equipment but not the actual building. The real value in the deal for Tealwood is that it also gets the facility's state-authorized bed capacity.

Tealwood already owns a competing nursing home in the southwest Minnesota city and will transfer some of the residents there. Pat Nelson serves on the Tracy Nursing Home board. She says a basic economic problem forced the closure. The nursing home has too few residents.

"It's a shame that it's being closed."

"We are very sad to have to shut down because of lack of residents," says Nelson. "Changes in nursing needs has gone to home health care and also to assisted living so we are no longer seeing as many residents and thus the revenue has dropped."

The growth in nursing home options has been especially noticeable in assisted living. These units typically provide an individual apartment for a resident, meals in a common dining area and on site medical help. The number of assisted living buildings has more than doubled in the last decade in Minnesota.

Bob Held of the Minnesota Department of Human Services says more people now live in these sorts of apartments than in nursing homes, some 45,000 versus 35,000 in nursing homes.

"There's been a long-standing desire or goal on the part of the state to shift where care takes place and to reduce the number of nursing home beds," says Held.

He says the state policy is popular, since most seniors prefer home care or assisted living to nursing homes. Held says the policy includes a moratorium on adding new nursing home beds in Minnesota, except in special circumstances.

The shift in elder care has caused more than 50 nursing homes to close in the state in the last decade.

Some people in the industry wonder if that's too rapid a pace. Held says he and others must make sure enough nursing homes remain to handle future needs. That includes the demands of an aging population bubble known as the baby boom.

Held closely watches supply and demand. He compares the number of people needing nursing home care with the actual number of nursing home beds in the state. He says any bed shortage is still years in the future.

"If you kind of take the various need for bed lines and sort of look at the average, it looks like we're pretty safe until about 2015," says Held.

Still Held says the state is considering some shifts in policy to slow the rate of nursing home closures. Right now the state offers several incentive programs to owners to encourage them to close their nursing homes.

He says one proposal would allow state officials to suspend the incentives in parts of the state if they decide there are too few nursing home beds in that area to meet demand. One area of concern may be rural regions like the Tracy area. When the nursing home there closes 99-year old Agnes Seykora will be moving on, against her wishes.

"I was just floored because I came here with the understanding that I would be able to make the rest of my life here," says Seykora. "And it just floored me. I just couldn't believe it."

Seykora will be moving about seven miles to the town of Walnut Grove. There she plans to move into an assisted living apartment, the very units that have caused demand for nursing homes to drop.