Nursing home closure put residents at risk

A HASTILY arranged exodus of elderly residents from a private Kilkenny nursing home put them in serious risk and forced authorities to take over running of the facility on an emergency basis.

When health officials arrived at Avondale Nursing Home in July they found the person in charge, Miriam Holmes, was in breach of seven different regulations.

Money and personal belongings of the residents could not be properly accounted for. Staff had not been paid.

And there were significant shortages of food, including just one bag of potatoes.

These have now been spelled out in a report by Health Information and Quality Authority’s into the circumstances which has led to the closure of the Avondale Nursing Home on West Street, Callan, Co Kilkenny.

The report was one of six published on the home following HIQA’s decision to bring in the Health Service Executive to close it down in an orderly fashion.

The HSE was brought in on July 21 after a series of inspections.

By that stage Ms Holmes had begun moving residents off the premises according to a plan she told officials was in her head.

She contacted other nursing homes and asked for long term accommodation for 10-12 residents, and this was done without consultation with the individuals or their relatives.

Two residents, one of who is terminally ill, was to be moved to another home in a wheelchair taxi which was later deemed to be a “totally unsuitable mode of transport”.

Two of the residents had come to the Avondale from a long stay psychiatric hospital and HIQA said the nursing home’s actions created a “serious risk” to their mental well being.

One of these people was told she was leaving the home and was being moved to Waterford the next day. But she had no idea where Waterford was.

On July 20, four people had been discharged by evening time, from a total of 19 who had been living there.

Later, that night, one woman was told by a text message that her relative was being relocated within two days to a place which would have cut off the possibility of family contact.

The HIQA report said the “residents’ general practitioners had not been informed or consulted and no adequate arrangements were made for continuity of medical care”.

When the HSE stepped in to organise its closure, staff had not been paid and basic food supplies such as meat, vegetables, cereals, milk and bread had to be bought.