Nuns to shut care home on prime city site

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-bed Hope Residential and Nursing Care 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 reveal, however, that they have investments of £23 million. The accounts 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 on a site in Cambridge overlooking the Botanical Gardens and likely to be worth many millions of pounds. A four-bedroom house nearby was recently under offer for £1.95m.

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 “traumatic and deeply depressing” for residents, their families and the 100 staff members who would now be out of a job.

“The closure was announced brutally at a meeting, for which I received less than 24 hours’ notice,” 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 Sr Gemma Corbett, the provincial, in London. “She told us that the sisters wanted to follow Pope Francis’ 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, Sr Gemma told The Tablet that the decision to close the home 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 home 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 home  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.