White River Junction
Each Halloween, the family would come to the 67-bed nursing home on Christian Street to trick or treat.
“It was a safe place and the looks on the residents’ faces that kids are coming in is, you know, priceless,” said Silverstein, who noted that her three children now 4, almost 8 and 12, have grown up with “extra grandparents.”
The pull of her Brookside family, which included colleagues and residents, was so great that when Silverstein left to earn $5 more per hour as a visiting nurse, she returned in less than two years.
“That was more salary-related and thinking maybe I needed a change to benefit my family, but ultimately my family needed me to have the coworkers who support me, so I went back,” said Silverstein, a Thetford resident who worked at Brookside from 2009 to 2012 and from 2014 until last Friday.
Silverstein’s Brookside colleagues supported her through her son’s recent mental health struggles. When he needed to come with her to work, her colleagues checked on him and brought games for him to play, she said.
The staff’s kindness wasn’t reserved only for coworkers. If dying patients didn’t have family members to sit with them, nursing assistants took turns holding their hands, “because they didn’t want the person to be alone,” Silverstein said.
Now, Silverstein is one of 49 employees who have lost or are losing their jobs as a result of Brookside nursing home’s closing, which is scheduled for Wednesday. As a result, she and her former colleagues are mourning the loss of their Brookside family.
Though three former members of Brookside’s nursing staff, including Silverstein, acknowledge that the facility has had quality problems in recent years, documented in state inspections, which resulted in the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services ending payments to Brookside, they say they miss the sense of community there and will have trouble finding it elsewhere.
Quality problems documented in inspections conducted by the state’s Department of Disabilities, Aging and Independent Living’s Division of Licensing and Protection included food safety, staffing levels, a gap in contracts between providers of rehabilitation services that left some patients without such services for a time, and failure to ensure that patients see their doctor regularly.
Brookside’s CMS quality rating slipped from five to two stars since it changed hands from the White River Junction-based Rice family to a group of New York-based real estate investors in 2015.
Though the former employees say they did what they could to maintain the quality of care they provided, they were up against absentee owners and managers who did not visit often or seem to hear their concerns, which included a failure to provide adequate supplies of basic staples such as milk and baby wipes, said Natalie DeSantis, a registered nurse who worked at Brookside from 2012 until June.
DeSantis also pointed to the new management’s struggles in paying contractors such as the trash collector or the telephone company, which sometimes resulted in trash piling up and the telephone being disconnected.
“It’s funny because the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t,” said DeSantis, who moved to Burlington this summer and now works as a hospice and palliative care nurse for the Visiting Nurse Association of Chittenden and Grand Isle Counties.
An email sent to two of the owners currently listed on the CMS website, Sam Love and Yechiel Landau, and a member of the management team, Mayer Spilman, went unanswered on Wednesday afternoon.
When the Rice family owned Brookside, DeSantis said Tom Rice, Brookside’s former administrator, was there all the time and he was “always in our business.”
But, it was precisely that close oversight that DeSantis said she missed under the new owners.
“We actually called Tom at one point and we’re like, ‘We really miss you,’ ” she said.
Crystal Burch, a licensed technical nurse and Brookside’s former admissions and marketing director, said that when the Rices left it felt as though “a good portion of the heart of the building had left.”
Burch praised Paul Kovacs, who became Brookside’s administrator this summer, as an advocate for both staff and residents, but she said his arrival came too late to save the facility.
Prior to Kovacs’ arrival, the facility was managed by Jennifer Combs-Wilber, administrator of Green Mountain Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, a Colchester, Vt., facility that the same ownership group also purchased from the Rices in 2015. Also since the ownership change, Brookside saw changes in leadership in its director of nursing, director of food service and its activities director, the former employees said.
Burch, who after six and a half years at Brookside will begin a new job as a licensed practical nurse in a dermatology clinic at the White River Junction VA Medical Center on Monday, said she wanted to emphasize that Brookside’s closing was “not because we didn’t try everything we could to make this work.”
The dermatology clinic will be a big change for Burch, but she needs some time away from nursing homes after discharging more than 30 Brookside residents in less than two months, she said.
“I can see myself going back to long-term care, but my heart needs a break,” she said.
The ownership change meant a shift in the attitude of the managers, said Ashley Hart, a licensed nursing assistant who worked at Brookside from 2009 until last week. The Rices checked in with staff members each day to see how they were doing, Hart said. But the new managers seemed “more concerned about getting security cameras installed,” she said.
“I don’t have a lot of positives to say about the new owners,” said Hart, who began working at Brookside as an 18-year-old Oxbow High School graduate. “I owe everything to the Rice family. When they owned it, it was a family.”
During her time at Brookside, Hart had a baby — a daughter, who is now 4 — and got married. She had baby and bridal showers at Brookside.
“That place was my world,” Hart said.
When her daughter was born, she stopped by Brookside on her way home to Newbury, Vt., to show her off. One of the residents helped Hart change her daughter’s diaper.
“That’s what it’s all about there,” she said.
Hart made some of her best friends at Brookside, she said, some of whom would be joining the dozens of people coming to her house for dinner on Thanksgiving.
“Once you worked there, there’s a part of it that never leaves you,” she said.
Hart is currently job hunting, but has yet to find a place that makes her feel at home as Brookside did.
“I will get back into the LNA role,” she said. “I needed a minute to grieve. That’s what it comes down to. It’s been my life for 10 years.”
Brookside’s former employees are entering the job market at a time of low unemployment in both of the Twin States. In Windsor County, the unemployment rate was 2 percent in October, according to the state’s Department of Labor. There is a particularly high need for nurses.
The “staffing situation in the states of Vermont and New Hampshire is critical,” Genesis HealthCare’s Lebanon Center’s Executive Director Dottie Ruderman said in an interview last month relating to Brookside’s pending closure.
New Hampshire’s low unemployment rate — 2.7 percent in October — as well as the aging populations, are factors contributing to the difficulties she and other nursing home managers have in finding and retaining qualified staff, Ruderman said last month.
She also noted that the tasks involved in nursing can be arduous.
“It isn’t always a glamorous job,” said Ruderman, who is a registered nurse herself. “People throw up on you. … It’s hard. Emotionally and physically hard work.”
Like Hart, Silverstein is taking her time as she looks for a new job. She hopes to enjoy the holidays with her family.
The silver lining of the situation is “the opportunity it gives me to sort of take a breath, regroup and spend some quality time with my kids,” she said. “I get to be mom for a little bit and that is pretty priceless.”
In the meantime, Silverstein said that the need for a nursing home in White River Junction remains. Many of Brookside’s former residents have left the Upper Valley and are living in nursing homes elsewhere while they wait for beds to open up closer to home.
Should someone figure out a way to tear down the 92-year-old building that has been Brookside, rebuild and open a new nursing home in its place, Silverstein said, “I would probably be the first one to walk in and be like, ‘I want a job.’ ”
Nora Doyle-Burr can be reached at ndoyleburr@vnews.com or 603-727-3213.
