Shelly Olson’s mother, who has dementia, has lived at the Scandia Village nursing home in rural Sister Bay, Wisconsin, for almost five years. At first, Olson said, her mother received great care at the facility, then owned by a not-for-profit organization, the Evangelical Lutheran Good Samaritan Society.
Then, in 2019, Sanford Health — a not-for-profit, tax-exempt hospital system — acquired the nursing home. The coronavirus pandemic struck soon after. From then on, the facility was regularly short of staff, and residents endured long wait times and other care problems, said Olson, a registered nurse who formerly worked at the facility.
Now Scandia Village has a new, for-profit owner, Continuum Healthcare. Olson said she was reassured when Continuum hired two locals as the facility’s new administrator and nursing director.
But Kathy Wagner, a former Scandia Village nursing director, is not optimistic.
“The for-profit owner will face the same problems,” said Wagner, who is now retired and serves on an informal task force that monitors the facility’s quality of care. “No one has articulated what the for-profit owner will bring to the table to change the picture.”
The sale of Scandia Village this year is part of a trend of for-profit companies, including private equity groups and real estate investment trusts, snapping up struggling not-for-profit nursing homes, many of which were operated for decades by Lutheran, Catholic, Jewish and other faith-based organizations.
The pace of sales has ticked up, reaching a high last year, according to Ziegler Investment Banking. Since 2015, 900 not-for-profit nursing homes and senior living communities nationwide have changed hands, with more than half of them acquired by for-profit operators.
For-profit groups own about 72% of the roughly 15,000 nursing homes in the United States, which serve more than 1.3 million residents.
While overall for-profit ownership percentage hasn’t notably…
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