Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of stories examining the closing of the state veterans home in Fayetteville. Read part one here.
In the final days before closing, few veterans remained at the North Carolina State Veterans Home in Fayetteville, but the facility’s unexpected shutdown — which gave residents and staff only a little over two months to move out — has ignited a chain reaction in North Carolina, the fifth most-populous state of veterans.
The N.C. Dept. of Military and Veteran Affairs (DMVA) manages five state-owned nursing homes in North Carolina, contracting with PruittHealth, a for-profit healthcare company, to operate the facilities. The homes provide veterans and qualifying family members a living space and in-patient medical treatment and rehabilitation services, the cost of which can be reduced with Veterans Affairs benefits and government health insurance.
A network of statewide veterans groups have been pushing for N.C. elected officials and the DMVA to take immediate action to support displaced veterans in the wake of the facility’s closing and make concrete commitments toward building a new Fayetteville home, including support letters circulated by two major veterans coalitions — the North Carolina Veterans Council (NCVC) and the NC Council of Chapters (NCCOC).
Jay Wood, who heads the NCVC, said the collective efforts of both official and unofficial veterans groups and advocates seemed to have piqued the interest of state legislators, who appeared to be growing “more aware” of the circumstances around the shutdown.
Last Friday, CityView spotted around a dozen state legislators and DMVA officials walking around the perimeter of the veterans home; Tammy Martin, communications director for the DMVA, confirmed they were touring the facility.
As CityView attempted to ask Martin further questions about the group’s visit, an individual from the group told CityView they could not conduct the interview on “state property.” After initially refusing to declare their identity, the individual said they worked for Whitney Bell, the PruittHealth manager of the facility. Shortly thereafter, another employee threatened to call authorities if CityView did not leave the premises.
In a telephone call Sunday, Wood expressed concern over Friday’s visit from state officials, including the legislator's interactions with the remaining residents. Wood told CityView he had unsuccessfully attempted to call the state veterans home several times on Friday to get in contact with a resident and encourage the resident to talk to legislators.
“I kept getting put on hold, told he [the resident] wasn't available,” Wood recalled.
Based on Wood’s conversations with this resident after the meeting, he believes the meeting amounted to a “scripted” visit, which he said gave little opportunity for the residents to interact with the state officials.
Veterans still at Fayetteville facility
As of last week, six veterans remained at the facility, various sources have told CityView, including Wood and one of the facility’s certified nursing assistants (CNA), whom CityView granted anonymity over retaliation concerns.
Meanwhile, advocates and employees say the circumstances of the displaced veterans since the Nov. 21 announcement have been fraught with complications. The CNA said three former residents had died “shortly after” moving out of the state veterans home to a new facility. The employee said, in their opinion, the stress of the expedited move could have been a contributing factor in the former residents’ deaths, likening the move to a “rude awakening,” with the new facilities bringing different standards of care than the veterans home and an unfamiliar staff.
The CNA also reported receiving calls from other residents who moved out, saying they were “not getting good treatment” elsewhere and wanted to return.
Renee Martin, whose 90-year-old father resided in the veterans home, said she consistently received mixed messages about her father’s relocation throughout the moving process. After initially being told by staff that the veterans home would transport her father to his new care home, Martin said she was then informed that the new home would be picking him up. This was concerning to Martin because her father has dementia.
“And that was important to me, because these nurses and CNAs back there, they're like my dad's family now,” Martin said. “They were really good to him and they would take him to his appointments and stuff.”
While Martin was eventually able to get the state veterans home to take her father to his new care home, she was concerned by the reversal after being told initially that state veterans home staff would provide relocation assistance, as the facility had advertised.
Transportation assistance, Martin said, was not the only communication issue she dealt with while moving her father. Martin said she was initially told, unprompted, by a staff member at the veterans home that the U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs would be supplementing the cost of her father’s stay at the new facility. However, a few weeks after her father’s move, Martin said a staff member at the veterans home called to tell her that the VA would not supplement the costs of her father’s care at a new home because it was not a “skilled nursing” facility. She recalled being confused and frustrated by the additional change in messaging.
“But what's even worse is the way it was handled, the promises that were made,” Martin said of the relocation process.
“You have veterans going to these places, getting settled in, thinking that they're good, and now all of a sudden they've got to move or they've got to come back, because what you told them wasn't true,” Martin added.
The CNA that CityView spoke to said at least two residents who had moved returned to the state veterans home in Fayetteville soon after leaving. One had reportedly been denied access to a new facility for unknown reasons, the staff member said, while the other was unable to cover the financial costs for the new facility, where he had to pay out of pocket and was not covered by benefits.
Overall, the CNA said the move has brought uncertainty to those who relied on it for care and work.
“They don't know what's going to happen when they leave,” the staff member said of the residents. As for the employees: “We're just out on our own, [and] have to try to find new jobs all over again.”
To date, PruittHealth has either declined to answer or has redirected all questions from CityView regarding the closing to the DMVA.
Oversight and transparency questions
Adding to the uncertainty of the situation are ongoing transparency, communication and oversight concerns over the state agency overseeing the facility: the N.C. Dept. of Military and Veteran Affairs. In a press release, the agency has maintained that the property’s flood-prone nature and the building’s “significant repair needs and structural deficiencies” have made it untenable for future occupants. Still, staff members, family members and residents have said they were told black mold was the reason behind the facility’s closing, a point which the DMVA has denied.
The N.C. Dept. of Health and Human Services (NCDHHS) has also said it did not deem the state veterans home in Fayetteville a public safety threat at the time of its closing.
“Based upon available information and our scope of responsibility, NCDHHS did not consider the Fayetteville veteran’s home to be a safety concern,” an agency spokesperson said in an email to CityView on Jan. 17.
While the NCDHHS inspections do not address “topography or foundational issues,” they do cover basic maintenance issues like plumbing, fire suppression and emergency power systems, the spokesperson said. According to this criteria, an NCDHHS inspection on Sept. 27 “did identify several minor deficiencies — all of which were found to be corrected at the time of reinspection on Dec. 6, 2023,” the agency spokesperson said.
According to data from Medicare.gov, the veterans home in Fayetteville has had to pay $106,824 in federal fines for violations found during government health inspections since April 2022. Moreover, NCDHHS has found dozens of deficiencies in inspections in recent years, mainly centering around medical care issues like problems filling medications for patients and deficiencies in sanitation procedures. Only one inspection — from 2012 — noted any issues with the building’s safety and infrastructure features.
Residents of the Fayetteville home and PruittHealth employees being unwilling or unable to speak about issues at veterans home in Fayetteville is not uncommon, according to former resident John McGee. McGee, a former military police officer for the U.S. Air Force, said he was forcibly evicted from the facility in 2020.
The eviction notice, shared with CityView, states the reason as being “it is necessary for your welfare and your needs cannot be met in this facility.” Yet McGee said he was retaliated against for being outspoken over issues occurring at the facility, ranging from residents not being cleaned properly to a lack of access to entertainment to short staffing. Emails he sent during that time, and after his eviction, demonstrated his increasing desperation to find help as his eviction day neared.
“I presented a danger to them because I could figure out what was going on,” McGee said. “As I like to tell people, ‘Hey, look, when I was in the Air Force, I used to be popo [police], OK? And popo can figure out what's going on, and there was all sorts of shady goings on.’”
The closure of state veterans homes in Fayetteville has also renewed concerns over previous regulatory failures of the DMVA, including the agency reportedly ignoring a 2021 mandate from the N.C. General Assembly to conduct a long-term care assessment of its veterans nursing homes, as reported by NC Health News.
“Our evidence so far suggests that when the legislature, after Covid, demanded and legislated that there would be an accounting of what was going on in all of our state veterans homes and that NCDMVA would report that, and that was in the ‘21-22 budget,” Wood said. “…They failed to comply with that.”
Wood said the DMVA not yet completing the assessment demonstrates a lack of adequate oversight with the department. Completing that assessment is one of the recommendations the NCVC, in collaboration with the NCCOC, has put forward for the DMVA and state legislators following the facility’s closure. Some of the groups’ other recommendations include:
All told, Wood said he hopes the closure of the state veterans home and the increased scrutiny the DMVA has received as a result will bring more accountability and transparency to the state agency.
“We want that [accountability] for all 85 of those residents. We want them taken care of because of the respect that they earned and deserved, because they wore the uniform they didn't have to, and they did,” Wood said. “And the fact that the optics look more disrespectful and look like politics as usual, that's unacceptable.”
Contact Evey Weisblat at cityviewnc.com or 216-527-3608.
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