For the last six years, Jeannette Crowe has called the Hughes Health and Rehabilitation Center home. The 84-year-old with multiple sclerosis expected to die at the five-star facility, surrounded by the staff that has become like family.
But all that changed last month, when Sam Flaxman the grandson of the man who bought the West Hartford building in 1961 and turned it into a 170-bed long-term care home walked into a meeting with the 81 residents still living at Hughes to make a stunning announcement: The nursing home was closing.
The closure of Hughes Health and Rehabilitation Center is in part a consequence of a statewide shift to home and community-based services and in part due to declining occupancy and swelling costs.