Lamel Beeches care home in York to close - with residents told to move

Lamel Beeches care home, in Heslington Road, which is run by the Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust (JRHT), will shut in May.

The 47 staff members who work at the home - providing care and nursing for older people - were told the news yesterday.

JRHT bosses say the home has been forced to close for financial reasons, saying it has been operating with "high room vacancy rates" for the last two years.

They added it was hoped the residents would choose to move to one of two other care homes run in York by JRHT - New Lodge or Hartrigg Oaks.

But Amanda Daw, whose 94-year-old mother is a resident at the home, hit out at the way the news had been broken to her mum.

She said: “They ignored my mother’s care notes which had the instructions to go to me first with any important communications.

“My mother is 94 and she gets muddled. It was a terrible shock to her as all she understood was that two women came into her room on Friday to say ‘your care home is shutting down’.”

Amanda added that her mum, who she did not wish to name, has lived at Lamel Beeches for five years - initially funded by the family and more recently with financial support from the City of York Council.

A spokesperson at JRHT said: “The reasons for the closure are financial.

"Unfortunately, Lamel Beeches has been operating with high room vacancy rates for the past two years. This has made it impossible for the home to break even.

"The building’s age also raises the costs of future upgrades. As a non-profit provider of care, we cannot afford to carry such losses indefinitely.

“Before sharing this difficult news with residents, we carried out robust checks with the onsite management team to understand whether any residents were likely to have specific communication needs.

"Without getting into the details of individual residents, we are confident that our communications with residents and their families were in keeping with prior agreements about information sharing."

The spokesperson added that it was hoped the staff members at Lamel Beeches would be able to move to jobs at alternative care homes.

They said: “Although there are 47 members of staff, we strongly expect redundancies to be minimal as a result of this closure due to opportunities for affected staff to work at our other care homes in York.”

One care assistant at Lamel Beeches, who did not want to be named, told The Press the job was ‘incredibly stressful’ due to understaffing.

She said: “A lot of residents need one to one care which we unfortunately cannot provide - we have many people all due for personal care all at the same time, and sometimes this results in staff having no or little breaks.

“A lot of staff are being asked to move to a new care home which isn’t ideal for a lot of staff due to the distance, but if another lodge has a lot of spare rooms to fit all our residents, then I suppose they had to close in order to fill a home.”

The JRHT spokesperson said there were "no fixed plans" for the building at this point.