ST. LOUIS — As residents were evacuated from Northview Village Nursing Home last month, the facility’s phone lines were down. The elevator stalled, trapping nine people inside. One of the home’s top managers remained in her office, and another left.
Residents were moved to other facilities in the middle of the night — in some cases, without medical records, medications and personal possessions.
These details, reported in a state inspection document released Wednesday, build on previous accounts from workers, patient advocates and union officials of the sudden shutdown of Northview Village, once the city’s largest nursing home, at 2415 North Kingshighway. Residents were evacuated from the building beginning on the evening of Dec. 15 and into the morning of Dec. 16.
“It just really highlights on an hour-by-hour basis what a nightmare this was for residents,†said Lenny Jones, state director for Service Employees International Union Healthcare, which represents Northview workers.
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The report illustrates the chaos that followed the discovery that Northview staff wouldn’t be paid. It also documents for the first time how one owner of the facility said he didn’t have the cash to cover payroll, and he couldn’t get it from his business partners.
Just before 5 p.m. on Dec. 15, the facility’s administrator told the inspector that the emergency preparedness plan had been enacted. Staff from other nursing homes in the area began to arrive, to transport Northview’s residents elsewhere, sometimes over their objections and confusion.
But no one was in charge, according to the state report. Officials from other nursing homes and emergency services crews arrived at Northview throughout the night to discover that, in at least one case, the resident they expected to transport to one home had already been removed by another facility.
It was “a free-for-all up there,†said one administrator from another facility who was there to transfer people. Northview had been home to 174 people.
The Northview nursing director told the state inspector that she was unsure how to organize the evacuation. Nurses were supposed to keep track of who was going where, she said, but it was overwhelming, and several department heads were off that day. The nursing director was so anxious, the inspector wrote, that she vomited, and went home sick at around 10 p.m. that night.
“Before you knew it, people were gone,†the nursing director said, according to the report.
A nurse who was working at Northview on a contract said that her staffing agency instructed her to leave for her own safety, the report says.
The report also says that two residents left the building. One, the Post-Dispatch previously reported, walked away from Northview and was located three weeks later at a restaurant about a mile from the facility. According to the inspection report, a second resident, whose disappearance had not previously been reported, was found at a gas station the following afternoon, 7 miles from the facility. Police brought the resident to a local hospital.
The inspector wrote that several residents protested being moved or refused to leave. In one case EMS physically removed a resident, and another was medicated before being transported.
The last resident was removed from Northview around 5:30 a.m. on Dec. 16, the report says.
The state inspection report also reveals new details about a financial dispute among the facility’s owners.
The afternoon of Dec. 15 the chief financial officer emailed the nursing home’s administrator. (The owners’ names are redacted in the report. They are referred to as “Owner A,†“Owner B,†“Owner C,†and “Owner D.â€)
“After a long fight to get the ownership to fund Northview’s continuing losses, I, nor (Owner A) have been able to get funds from the other part of the ownership group for Northview,†the email said. “(Owner A) is not able to fund this as he has exhausted everything he has from funding his homes for so long. I am not sure what to say as I have had many solutions to get us through our cash flow issues, but I do not have a solution this week.â€
The nursing home was operated by Brentwood-based Healthcare Accounting Services. The company’s owner, Mahklouf “Mark†Suissa, of Chicago, did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.
While Suissa and his wife, Lorraine, hold a majority stake, according to the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, his minority partner includes members of the Rothner family, who own and operate nursing homes in multiple states.
Eric Rothner did not immediately return a call seeking comment Wednesday.