Menlo Park nursing home patients may have to find a new home Menlo Park nursing home patients may have to find a new home (November 16, 2005)

** Facility hikes rates and puts focus on short-term care.

By Rory Brown

Almanac Staff

Sharon Heights Care and Rehab, a Menlo Park nursing home, is raising its rates, making it expensive for long-term patients to stay.

The new costs, effective December 1, have drawn complaints from the San Francisco-based California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform (CANHR), which says this is the second effort by the facility to unjustly evict long-term patients.

On November 1, the nursing home issued a letter to its long-term patients, stating rates will jump to a range of $350 to $450 per day. Current rates range from $172 to $290 for long-term patients, depending on the type of room, said Leslee Fennell, the facility's administrator.

Current rates don't cover the costs of medication, therapy and care required for long-term patients, said Ms. Fennell. It's also difficult for Sharon Heights Care and Rehab to compete with assisted-living programs that have more resources, she said.

Ms. Fennell acknowledged that the rate increase has forced patients to look for options; none of the long-term patients' families has expressed interest in keeping their relatives at the facility.

"Families have the freedom to spend their dollars where they want, and paying $350 a day for a shared room is probably not what they want to do," she said.

"Our long-term residents here are like family, and it's always hard to say goodbye to family," said Ms. Fennell. "But we can't compete with the level of care available at other locations. We can compete in the post-acute market, and that will be our focus."

But representatives from CANHR say the hike in prices is an effort by the facility to kick out long-term patients -- an objective the nursing home has been trying to achieve since September.

On October 4, CANHR filed a complaint with the Department of Health Services about another letter sent to long-term patients of the Sharon Heights facility, dated September 28.

In the letter, Ms. Fennell said the facility's focus was shifting to solely short-term post-acute care and rehabilitative therapies, and long-term residents were given 60 days to find other accommodations.

But the facility violated a state law in that letter, said Michael Connors, a long-term care advocate for CANHR, who wrote the complaint.

"California has a unique law that requires nursing homes to submit a relocation plan, complete with justification for the relocation, to the Department of Health Services, if 10 or more patients are going to be moved out of the facility," said Mr. Connors. "The relocation plan has to be approved, but [Sharon Heights Care and Rehab] never submitted any kind of plan, and the administrator said she wasn't aware such a law existed."

Ms. Fennell issued a letter of retraction on October 7, and the Department of Health Services is still conducting its investigation.

On November 10, Mr. Connors submitted another complaint to DHS, arguing the facility "is circumventing critical eviction and transfer protections by using unconscionable rate increases to force residents to move."

"They're trying to price people out when they can't legally evict them," said Mr. Connors.

There are about 25 long-term residents still at the facility, said Ms. Fennell.

According to Mr. Connors, leaving the facility could be a hazardous process for fragile patients. "We're talking about elderly people in fragile health, some [who] have been there for years," he said. "These are vulnerable people that should not have to move because of profit motivations."

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