Bainbridge Island’s only privately owned skilled nursing facility, Messenger House Care Center, is set to close, forcing residents and staff alike to begin seeking alternative homes and places of work.

Though no actual “last day” has yet been announced, the nursing home, located on Manitou Park Boulevard, is expected to be completely vacant in the next three to four months.

Scott Hale, president of Symmetry Healthcare Management, was brought in as a consultant to coordinate the closure. He said ultimately 51 residents will have to be relocated from the facility, which was founded in the 1960s.

“An actual nursing home closure can be complicated process,” Hale said. “So we’re kind of getting ahead of that so it’s more, at least at this level, a participatory function.”

Hale said that no formal 60- or 90-day notices have yet been issued to Messenger House residents, as the actual closure process is yet to be finalized and approved by government officials. Nevertheless, staff are now assisting clients in finding new homes.

“We’re trying to spread this out a little bit,” Hale said. “A formal process has not occurred yet.”

There exist several potential new homes for Messenger residents, Hale said, and the staff has already been in contact with several nearby facilities, both on the island and “adjacent to the island,” about transferring clients who wish to remain in the area.

Only about one third of the residents are actually from the local area, Hale said. Messenger staff are in some cases looking at relocating residents closer to family, if possible.

The staff (Messenger House employs roughly 75 full- and part-time employees) will ideally get hired by other healthcare providers, Hale explained. Many, in fact, had reportedly already been sought out by such entities.

“There’s a shortage in most health care settings,” Hale said. “We’ve been reached out to by other agencies already.”

The goal, of course, is to “transition the staff at the same rate the residents transition,” Hale explained. “So far it’s going well.”

There is no possibility, he added, that a Messenger resident could find themselves with no place to go.

“There is no chance of that,” Hale said. “That does not happen.

“The building keeps operating until the last resident has been placed.”

It was for financial reasons that Soundcare, the company that owns Messenger House, decided to close it. It is a 96-bed facility, which has long been housing fewer patients than intended. There did not exist, Hale said, the demand for its services one might expect given the island’s demographics. Being in a “fairly exclusive residential neighborhood,” Hale said, it was likely that nearby residents of an age to require such services were affluent enough to find alternative, “less institutionalized” options when seeking care.

Also a burden to the facility, the fact that so few of employees lived close. It was unclear how much such a factor affected staff retention, though Hale said ideally staffers could if they chose live closer to work.

“That’s not been the case there,” Hale said.