An order of nuns has upset residents of a care home for the elderly by announcing they are no longer going to run the institution because the costs of upgrading the building are too great.
The Sisters of the Holy Family of Bordeaux have also said they want to instead follow the inspiration of Pope Francis and devote themselves to working with immigrants and asylum seekers.
The sisters have decided to close the 57-room Hope Residential and Nursing Home in a prime spot in Cambridge, after realising it needed significant structural changes to bring it up to modern standards and the expense was too great.
The order’s latest accounts, however, reveal they have investments of £23 million. They also show that the cost of running the care home was £2.49m while income from the home was £2.52m.
It is unclear what will happen to the home, which is in a site in Cambridge overlooking the Botanical Garden and likely to be worth many millions of pounds. A four-bedroom house nearby was recently under offer for £1.95 million.
Professor Helen Hills, whose 81-year-old mother Eva Rainbow-Hills has had to relocate to a new home where she is “unhappy, and misses her friends”, said the closure had been had been “traumatic and deeply depressing” for residents, their families and the 100 staff members.
“The closure was announced brutally at a meeting, for which I received less than 24 hours’ notice, where elderly, frail residents were gathered,” Professor Hills said. The closure was announced by the Holy Family and by the Healthcare Management Trust, which runs the home on their behalf.
She said that at one stage a group of family members had a meeting with Sister Gemma Corbett, the provincial, in London. “She told us that the sisters wanted to follow Pope Francis’s bidding and put their efforts into working with asylum seekers and immigrants,” said Professor Hills. “And we said that’s fine, but can you not make sure the home is sold as a going concern?”
In a statement, Sister Gemma told The Tablet that the decision to close the Hope was “very painful” and was only taken with great reluctance and after a long period of considering alternatives. “We were very conscious that closure would mean a great upheaval for our residents and staff.”
But, she said, the Hope could not continue in its current buildings without complete modernisation and accompanying large capital investment.
She said correspondence was sent out a week before the meeting at which residents and families were told, and that support was offered in the search for alternative accommodation.
Professor Hills said the Hope had been one of the happiest and best-run residential care homes in Cambridgeshire, and that her mother had been very happy there for the last two and a half years. “It’s a very special place with a lovely atmosphere, and my mother was devastated to leave it,” she said.
She said the oldest resident was 107, and the longest-term resident had been at the home for 14 years.
Above: Hope Residential and Nursing Care Home in Cambridge
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