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Families of more than 70 residents of Princeton Care Center had less than a day to find new facilities, due to a sale of the facility that fell through the day prior, a spokesperson for the state's health department tells NJ Advance Media.
A resident of the facility on Facebook said PCC patients were "fed and left in their soiled linens until they were moved to the new facilities as far as Morristown, and Montclair, New Jersey."
As of Monday morning, Sept. 4, PCC was listed on Google as being permanently closed, and its website had also been taken offline. Daily Voice's phone call placed to the facility Monday morning was not answered.
Princeton Mayor Mark Freda tells Daily Voice that the state's health department first notified local officials of financial problems with PCC on Aug. 4.
"We had a series of emails and phone calls where we pressed for a pro-active plan to be put in place and a notice to the residents and their families about the problems and the efforts to find a new operator of the facility and/or the potential for the facility to close," Freda said.
"The municipality has no authority over these types of facilities so we were unable to make these things happen prior to the abrupt closing."
On Friday, Sept. 1, local officials were on-site "for many hours" helping PCC families pack, coordinate what was going on, and calling for additional resources, the mayor said.
"We put a lot of effort into trying to make a bad situation better," he said.
Officials from the state's health department and the New Jersey Long-Term Care Facility Obudsman Laurie Facciarossa Brewer were at the Bunn Drive facility last Friday as it was being evacuated, Planet Princeton reports. Brewer told the outlet that this was the "worst possible outcome" and that the abrupt move is "traumatic" for residents and their families.
The Archer Law Office, which specializes in elder law and estate planning, in a blog post called the involuntary discharge "entirely wrong."
"Nursing homes that are closing do have rights to involuntarily transfer residents (move them somewhere else), but they ordinarily need to provide 30 days’ notice and have a good reason to do so," the post reads. "The facility closing is one of those reasons. Obviously, nobody involved here got the requisite notice.
"Facilities are allowed to involuntarily discharge a resident on less than 30 days’ notice for an emergency, but it is hard to see how the financial hardship qualifies as such an emergency."
Click here for more from Planet Princeton and here for more from NJ Advance Media.
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