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August 8, 2023

Deer Isle nursing home offers naming opportunities to meet $1.5M reopening goal

street and sign on pole Courtesy / Island Nursing Home The Island Nursing Home’s board of directors announced business-naming opportunities as the next phase of fundraising to reopen the Deer Isle residential care facility.
By Laurie Schreiber

The Island Nursing Home’s board of directors is offering naming rights to businesses in the next phase of fundraising to reopen the Deer Isle residential care facility.

The board considers contributions essential for its reopening plan, in order to fill a likely financial gap that will exist between MaineCare reimbursement rates and the cost of providing care.

The estimated gap is approximately $500,000 per year. The board said it must raise $1.5 million to cover that gap for the first three years in order to reopen.

More than a third of the goal has been raised.

“That is a great show of support, but the need to cover three years of the expected financial gap still exists,” said Leon Weed, the board’s president. “We cannot reopen this facility without the assurance that we can keep it going.”

sign with words
Courtesy / Island Nursing Home
The Island Nursing Home board of directors aims to raise $1.5 million to cover the gap for the first three years in order to reopen.

The business fundraising plan represents the next phase of the board’s efforts.

Naming opportunities are available for everything from gardens and benches, to wings of the building and the facility itself. The naming packages range from $25,000 up through $1 million.

Incorporating businesses into the fundraising plan is considered a win-win.

“Businesses can have many parts of our beloved building named after them, and we will be able to reopen to serve the elderly population in this area,” said the board’s treasurer, Skip Greenlaw. “Senior residential care is becoming scarce in our state, and we’re trying to reopen to fill the need.”

The board said its members will soon be reaching out to businesses. 

Staff and funding gaps

Although $500,000 in donations and pledges has come in to help cover the gap, the board won't spend the money until deciding to reopen the facility. If the facility does not reopen, donations will be returned. 

The reopening will depend on sufficient contributions to ensure the financial stability of the nursing home. 

The Island Nursing Home and Care Center, at 587 North Deer Isle Road on Deer Isle, is an independent, nonprofit elder care facility established in February 1983.

In August 2021, a severe shortage of qualified nursing staff forced the facility to close. Its residents were relocated to other facilities.

While the board was addressing the staffing challenges of reopening, a new challenge arose — covering the gap between state reimbursement rates for residents and the cost to run the facility. 

The board set out to make a plan for reopening the nursing home, seeking input from a variety of sources, including a task force of community members; PretiFlaherty, a law firm with expertise in matters related to nursing homes; Covenant Health, a regional health delivery network with nursing and assisted living facilities throughout New England; and the Maine Department of Health and Human Services.

The nursing home is licensed to provide both skilled nursing and residential care. The facility's licenses include 38 skilled nursing beds and 32 residential care beds. Skilled nursing beds require specially trained and certified medical staff.

Services can be paid for in three ways — private pay, long-term care insurance or, most commonly for the Deer Isle community, Medicaid or Medicare. 

In Maine, Medicaid is run under the name MaineCare.

Strict regulations

In order to qualify for Medicaid or Medicare payments, the facility must adhere to regulations that affect staffing, the facility and the services it can offer.

Because the education and certifications of various staff positions are regulated and vary widely, so do their cost and availability. 

The facility’s most difficult challenge over the years has been finding staff who live nearby and can be hired as full-time employees. 

Because state and federal regulations dictate how many staffers are needed, and set forth required ratios of staff based on licensed occupancy levels, the facility slowly reduced the number of residents for a few years, since it could not find enough staff to meet requirements. 

The board sought to counter the growing difficulties in hiring sufficient full-time employees by paying staffing agencies for contract employees — a much more expensive option. During the year prior to closing, the additional expense of paying for contractors instead of employees grew to approximately $600,000. 

Several events in the summer of 2021 made the situation far more urgent: 

  • The rapid decline in available healthcare staff due to the pandemic 
  • Several contract staffers chose not to renew their contracts 
  • Several staff members chose not to receive a COVID-19 vaccination 

During 2020 and 2021, the board said it exhausted recruiting options. The facility had 37 unfilled positions when it closed in 2021. 

The board projected it needs to hire more than 50 full-time care staffers to meet licensing requirements in order to reopen.

‘Incredibly expensive’

In order to meet regulations, the facility must have in place full-time staff in multiple slots — such as a director of nursing, a dietary manager, a social worker, nurses and CNAs — before it can accept even one skilled nursing level patient.

“The first patient in a reopened facility will be incredibly expensive,” says a report issued by the board in May 2022. “It could only become remotely affordable if we were somehow able to reach a full patient complement and a full staff.”

The board said it has considered reopening the facility for residential care only. But reimbursement rates fall short of covering true costs. 

“Simply put, the state will only pay for about one-half of what it costs us to provide residential care,” the report says. 

Housing crunch

Lack of affordable housing on or near Deer Isle has also been a challenge for staff recruitment. 

“When we were recruiting staff, we repeatedly lost candidates because there were no housing options available,” the board said in the report.

The board has been looking at the housing problem.

“We exhausted options for building on our existing land,” the report says. “We have looked at several houses to purchase for renovation. We examined several parcels of land for potential building sites. And we coordinated with the Island Workforce Housing Project (who brought their expertise to the task force). As a community organization, we remain committed to helping with this challenging problem, but it alone cannot address our staffing crisis.”

Still in good physical shape, the facility closed in October 2021. Last November, the board issued a plan for at least partial reopening with 32 residential care beds, which would include private rooms for all residents and bringing back qualifying residents who were displaced by the closure. At that time, the goal was to begin admitting residents by July 1, 2023.

Built in 1983, Island Nursing Home , then a 50-bed nursing home, was established by seven peninsula towns that raised $600,000 and obtained a loan of $600,000 from Farmer’s Home Administration. In later years, more rooms were added and the bed complement changed to accommodate a combination of 32 residential care and 38 skilled nursing beds. Since the opening of the facility, it has served more than 3,000 residents from the seven towns and beyond. 

In February the Maine Department of Health and Human Services issued a conditional license to the Island Nursing Home to operate a residential care facility.

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