End of the road for crisis-hit Inverness care home
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IT looks like the end of the road for a troubled Inverness care home after its owner said he planned to close it and inspectors issued damning findings into its management.
Admissions at the privately-run Fairfield Care Home were suspended in February last year after NHS Highland was "made aware of potential issues" around care there.
Five residents in their 80s and 90s died at the 35-bed Fairfield Road home within six days of each other at the end of January 2017, and all are understood to have been suffering from flu or flu-related illness.
The home has also been at the centre of nine other investigations in the past six years and this week the Care Inspectorate served a formal improvement notice on it, following an inspection which raised serious concerns.
"The care provided at this care home is not good enough," a spokesman said.
The notice calls for proper provision to meet residents’ needs and for care and support to be provided by "staff who are competent" as well as demanding that health and safety needs are "met in a manner which promotes [residents’] dignity".
A follow-up inspection is planned "soon" after September 1, but home owner Taj Manda has informed NHS Highland he now intends to close it, probably by the start of September.
Required to give the health authority 13 weeks’ notice, the move leaves NHS Highland, 18 residents and their families with the headache of finding suitable alternative accommodation.
A man who did not wished to be named but whose mother is a Fairfield resident suffering from advanced dementia said he feared any move would cause her "great distress".
He added: "This news for Inverness will perhaps comes as a total shock, although I must admit I am not in the least surprised, after the welter of criticism the home has come in for over the last few years from the Care Inspectorate."
He believed that the improvement notice "may have been instrumental" in the decision to put the home on the market.
The closure news did not surprise Dr Ian McNamara, chairman of the Highland Senior Citizens’ Network, who had previously blasted the home’s "chequered history".
"The question to ask really is why has it taken so long to reach this position," he said. "It seems inevitable in many ways, given the problems of the past.
"The care sector is one that is under considerable pressure nationwide. There are real financial pressures, but you almost always find that, where residents are suffering, it is down to management more than anything else."
He said it was likely residents and families would face difficulties in finding suitable alternative accommodation and added: "You would hope that most if not all can be rehomed in Inverness itself, but it is well-documented that moving people very late in life, particularly where they are frail and otherwise vulnerable, can be very difficult and unsettling."
A spokeswoman for NHS Highland confirmed Mr Manda has informed them of his intention to close Fairfield and that it was working to find new places for residents.
"Families are all being kept aware of this work," she said, adding that though the home was privately run, some residents would have been placed there by the NHS.
Mr Manda was not available for comment.
