TRANSFER TRAUMA
Published in AARP - December 2023
Winner of the SPD ‘Video of the Year’ award
In July 2022, Ballad Health — a large nonprofit health care chain serving mainly northeast Tennessee and southwest Virginia — announced it was closing Mountain View, a 44-bed nursing home in the small town of Norton, Virginia. The 20 long-term care residents who lived there would have to find new homes.
The residents were formally given until April 2023 to relocate. But several staff and family members of residents claim they felt pressure from Mountain View's management to relocate residents as quickly as possible. By mid-September 2022, all the residents were out.
Seven Mountain View residents died less than three months after their moves. Of the 18 residents who were relocated (two residents died before their transfers), only seven survive today. Though death rates among nursing home residents are typically high, Mountain View staff and families say the losses were excessive.
Negative impacts from relocating fragile residents — often labeled transfer traumas — have long been a problem for U.S. nursing homes.
DP/DIRECTOR/EDITOR: Ray Whitehouse
AUTHOR: Emily Paulin
PHOTOGRAPHY: Matt Eich