Nursing Home

Robert L. Killett is selling a nursing home business that has been his career for nearly 40 years, and his hometown is helping with the transaction.Sykesville, which has a budget of just more than $1 million, will issue $8.7 million in revenue bonds for the acquisition of Sykesville Eldercare Center by Continuum Care Corp., a Georgia-based nonprofit group.The buyer left the town little choice if it wanted to keep the longtime business alive."Without the bond issue, we would not buy the property," said Elizabeth M. Fago, president of Continuum Care, which owns eight nursing homes in Tennessee and Georgia.

A bookkeeper at Anne Arundel County's largest nursing home has been accused of carrying out an embezzlement scheme in which she allegedly stole $2,350 in just over four months.County police charged Monte Griffin, 34, with felony theft Aug. 11, police said, after owners of Wellspring Nursing Center noticed that the hours on her time card did not coincide with the hours for which she was paid.From a review of payroll records, Ms. Griffin appeared to have been paid for 250 extra hours, said Michael Francus, owner of the 200-bed home on Furnace Branch Road.

Edith B. Fuller, a retired registered nurse who worked in several area nursing homes, died of liver failure Tuesday at her Timonium residence. She was 70. She was born Edith Hall Bramlette and raised in Greenville, S.C., where she graduated from high school. She earned her bachelor's degree in nursing from the University of South Carolina at Spartanburg's School of Nursing in 1953. Mrs. Fuller was married in 1955 to William C. Fuller Jr., a Westinghouse Electric Corp. electrical engineer, who died in 1991.

The city housing commissioner has selected a Pasadena operator of three suburban nursing homes to complete and manage a boarded-up West Baltimore facility that was originally to be Baltimore's first black-owned, nonprofit nursing home.FutureCare Health and Management Corp. was chosen over four other developers -- two of them nonprofit -- to run the N. M. Carroll Health Care Facility at 1000 N. Gilmor St. in the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood."The city's priority was to provide quality health care to the community while avoiding any drain on the city's coffers," Daniel P. Henson III, the commissioner, said through a spokesman.

County officials have cleared the way for a Catonsville developer to build a 70-bed nursing home at an old salvage yard in Severna Park.On Tuesday, County Administrative Hearing Officer Robert C. Wilcox approved Matthew C. Decker's plans to build the 2 1/2 -story home on 3.7 acres at 831 Ritchie Highway.NTC Mr. Decker, of the Cypress Cove General Partnership, also received approval to place his sign within a 10-foot zone. County zoning codes prohibit such a sign less than 10 feet from the road.

After seven months of negotiation, a Columbia-based nursing home developer could be close to buying Heartlands, an Ellicott City retirement community.Constellation Health Services Inc. -- which owns nursing homes and retirement communities through joint ventures with other developers -- hopes to purchase the 163-unit campus within a month, said President James W. Jeffcoat.Owned by Health Park Housing Limited Partnership, Heartlands has apartments and one- and two-bedroom cottages -- all rentals -- for independent seniors.

Frances P. Norris, a retired nursing home aide, died of kidney failure Thursday at Good Samaritan Hospital. She was 66 and lived in Baltimore's Park Heights area. Mrs. Norris retired several years ago as a nurse's assistant after working at Baltimore nursing homes. Born in Bedford County, Va., Frances Price attended schools there and moved to Baltimore in 1970. Services will be held at noon tomorrow at Chatman-Harris Funeral Home, 5240 Reisterstown Road. She is survived by her husband of 21 years, LeRoy Norris; a daughter, Linda H. Payne of Lynchburg, Va.; two brothers, Joseph Price and John Price, both of Alvista, Va.; six sisters, Rosa Hunt of Lynchburg, Va., Shirley Tardy of Hurt, Va., Betty Waller of Halifax, Va., Betsy Waller of Danville, Va., Edna Pitts of Alvista and Doris Robinson of Lynch Station, Va.; and four grandchildren.

One of Howard County's two nursing homes is up for sale, but prospective buyers must continue to operate the facility as a nursing home and must not displace current residents, officials of the nursing home said yesterday.Bon Secours Nursing Care Center, which has 171 beds and 15 assisted-living spaces at its Ellicott City facility, announced last week that it plans to sell because it "is not well-positioned to participate in the evolving health care market," according to a written statement.

The city of Baltimore has foreclosed on the N. M. Carroll Health Care Facility, casting doubt on whether the financially troubled West Baltimore project will ever be operated by the community-based developers who struggled to build the nursing home.Strapped by its own financial problems, the city is seeking to take over the building in the 1000 block of Gilmor St. in an effort to recoup the $3.4 million it lent the project in 1987, said Nelson R. Stewart, an attorney representing the community-based developers who ran out of money last year and couldn't finish the job."

Kathleen M. Twigg, whose longtime work as a nurse and later as the owner of a Manchester nursing home brought comfort to the ill and infirm, died Wednesday in the nursing home she had founded of complications from a fractured hip. She was 87.Mrs. Twigg, who graduated in 1925 from the St. Agnes Hospital School of Nursing, was a registered nurse at St. Agnes Hospital, Sinai Hospital and a hospital in Hanover, Pa., before her first husband, Earl Wells, became ill in the early 1940s.She nursed him at home until his death in 1946, when she decided to turn her 19th-century Main Street home into a nursing home.