U.S. cuts off funding for troubled nursing home – chicagotribune.com

The conventional wisdom is that nursing home residents are frail and elderly. That’s not the reality. Increasingly, adults with serious mental illness are being housed and cared for in Missouri and Illinois nursing homes.

The forced closure of Whispering Oaks in Wildwood earlier this month focused attention on that trend.

St. Louis County Health Department officials ordered the facility to close after a well that supplied water froze, causing toilets to overflow. The facility had a history of fire and safety violations. State nursing home regulators tried to suspend its license last June.

Whispering Oaks housed a number of patients with serious mental illness. Several were relocated to another nursing home in St. Louis — owned by a psychiatrist — that also has been cited for safety violations in the past two years.
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