St. Louis’s largest skilled nursing facility abruptly closed over the weekend, sending 170 residents to other centers with no warning or time to pack and stranding more than 100 staffers without a paycheck. Workers walked out Friday upon learning that they might not be paid, putting the closure in motion. The facility’s rating was one star out of a possible five, and there had been numerous violations over the years. Officials at Healthcare Accounting Services LLC, owner of the Northview Village Nursing Home, did not answer the phone on Monday. The first that the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services heard of the closure was 4:15 p.m. Friday, spokeswoman Lisa Cox said. That set an evacuation plan in motion, with emergency medical service workers scrambling through the night to relocate residents to 15 or more facilities scattered throughout the St. Louis area. A room is left empty on the fourth floor at Northview Village Nursing Home in St. Louis on Saturday. (Vanessa Abbitt/St. Louis Post-Dispatch via AP) “The final resident left the facility before 6 a.m. Saturday,” Cox said in a Monday statement. “Our team continued working through the weekend following up with the receiving facilities to check in on the residents who had been transferred.” The departures were so sudden that televisions and radios were left on in in residents’ rooms, and their personal belongings were still there in the unsecured building, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported. Some of the arriving residents did not even have paperwork documenting their medical histories or medication regimens, an assistant manager at one of the homes they were taken to told the Post-Dispatch. Family members spent much of the weekend trying to find their resident relatives, with at least one of them filling out a missing-persons report on Monday trying to find his son, who was there recovering from a gunshot wound. “They don’t know where he is,” Alvin Cooper said of his son, 35-year-old Alvin Cooper Jr., who has been there for several months. “I’ve burnt two tanks of gas going back and forth to that nursing home trying to find out what’s going on. I don’t know if he’s somewhere safe or what’s going to happen to him.” With News Wire Services

St. Louis’s largest skilled-nursing home closes suddenly, stranding staff and residents