Johnathan Walker:1 still missing a week after St. Louis’ largest nursing home closed abrubtly

COLUMBIA,Johnathan Walker Mo. (AP) — One person is still missing a week after the abrupt closure of St. Louis’ largest nursing home left roughly 170 residents scattered at new facilities throughout the city, a state health department spokeswoman confirmed Friday.

Many patients left with nothing but the clothes they were wearing when Northview Village Nursing Home shuttered without warning last week, creating confusion and spurring outrage among residents and their families.

St. Louis police have been alerted about the final resident who remains unaccounted for, Health and Senior Services Department spokesperson Lisa Cox said in a Friday email.

Cox said Northview Village also has surrendered its license to operate, which will end the company’s contracts with Medicare and Medicaid.

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A person answering the phone said staff of Healthcare Accounting Services, which owns Northview Village and several other St. Louis residential homes, are gone for the holidays and declined to provide email addresses for company leaders.

One of Northview’s owners, Mark Suissa, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that the state wasn’t paying enough to keep the facility afloat and laid blame on staff, who did not receive paychecks the day the home closed.

“Of course I would have done it a different way,” he said of the closure. “I have other partners also involved. But unfortunately, that’s the way it happened.”

The union representing workers has said the company started to close the home and bus away residents after staff raised concerns about not being paid.

Levare Westbrook told the Post-Dispatch that he lost track of his 82-year-old mother, who has dementia, for more than two days after the home shut down.

“I did a whole lot of cursing until I finally found her,” he said.

Northview Village has been fined 12 times for federal violations since March 2021, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Fines totaled over $140,000 and ranged from $2,200 to more than $45,000. The federal agency gives Northview a one-star rating out of a possible five but doesn’t spell out reasons for the fines.

In addition, the state health department website lists nearly two dozen Northview investigations since 2016. The most recent complaint, from February, said a resident was able to get out of the building through an unsecured door. A 2021 complaint alleged the facility failed to investigate claims that residents left the nursing home and brought drugs into it.

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Researcher Rhonda Shafner contributed from New York.