By JOHN L. GUERRA and ANNE-MARGARET SWARY Citizen Staff

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The Key West Convalescent Center has moved more than a dozen residents out of the Stock Island facility in advance of losing its Medicare/Medicaid reimbursements on Dec. 11.

Some patients went to the nursing home's sister long-term care facility in Tavernier while others went to their families' homes in the Lower Keys. The center will continue moving patients in the next few weeks.

"We have moved about eight residents to Plantation Key Convalescent Center and we have various agencies in the building today working with families to find places for other residents," Scott Becht, chief operating officer of MidCare Inc., the company that owns the troubled nursing home, said Tuesday.

The company must find places for all 78 residents by Dec. 11. In the meantime, U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, MidCare attorneys and local government officials have asked the federal Centers for Medicare Medicaid Services (CMS) for a 90-day extension to give MidCare time to sell the convalescent center to new operators.

Company officials have said they are in negotiations with a Florida-based, nationally known company that is interested in buying the operation, which is housed in a College Road building owned by the Lower Keys Hospital District board. The board has no oversight of the facility.

MidCare said it decided to sell when CMS yanked its Medicare/Medicaid benefits because of a pattern of bad inspections. The latest, on Nov. 1, documented alleged patient abuse.

Kevin Keiffer, a 17-year resident, was in the parking in his wheelchair Tuesday saying goodbye to residents as they left for new places.

"It's like breaking up a family," he told The Citizen. "Some of us have been here for many years. We are like a family."

Keiffer's roommate died over the weekend, just days after families received a letter from Florida Medicare urging them to make arrangements to move their loved ones to new facilities.

"When my roommate came in here, he said he was never going to leave here," Keiffer said. "He was terminal but he considered this his home. As soon as he died, they moved his body and rolled his bed outside."

Wheelchairs, hospital bed frames, bed pans and other health-care equipment sat in a growing pile in the parking lot behind the convalescent center as Becht described the company's efforts to gain time.

"We're still waiting to hear from CMS on whether they'll grant us the extension," he said, adding that Ros-Lehtinen sent a letter to CMS asking for a deadline extension. "We should hear something by Friday."

Family members gave impassioned pleas for the Lower Keys Hospital District board to pass a similar resolution supporting an extension at the board's special meeting Tuesday night.

Melba Gil told the audience, which was void of any city or county officials, about the difficulty she's having finding a new nursing home that will take her mentally retarded sister, who has been at the Key West Convalescent Center for nearly 15 years. She had hoped to find a facility near Vero Beach, where she has family who could visit her, but she hasn't had any luck.

"I'll bring her home and do what I got to do," Gil said. "But there's some people who aren't going to make it back home."

Former Key West City Manager Julio Avael, who managed a nursing home facility in Fort Myers in the 1980s and 1990s and had a family member in the convalescent center, told the crowd that research he's seen showed residents staying in their home base would live 10 years longer than those who were moved far from home and family. Many who spoke in front of the crowd were afraid how their family members would react to the move and were near tears as they talked about not being able to visit as often as usual.

"I want to spend as much time with her as I possibly can," Judy Rafanelli said of her 87-year-old mother who currently lives at the facility. "I don't know how much time she has left."

Albert Sullivan, a retired oncologist from Boston who now volunteers his services for the local hospice organization, pointed out that the convalescent center is used as more than just a long-term care facility. It also provides short-term care for post-operative patients and rehabilitation for patients who eventually will be able to go home once they heal, such as for a broken hip.

At times, the emotional discussions grew heated, with people pointing the blame at Becht. Some people, including hospital district board member Annette Mobly, who manages the Key West Senior Citizens Center, demanded to know how things got so bad that the government agency felt it had to pull funding.

Carol Rogers, a former hospital administrator and former employee at the convalescent center, said the recent problems don't "just happen." She said part of the problem is that the facility has had more than a dozen different directors since it opened in 1984.

"No nursing home is perfect, no hospital is perfect," Rogers said. "But you have to try to be ready -- to make sure that when someone walks into your facility to survey it, they know that you're doing everything that you can and that you care."

Becht pleaded with the group to keep a united front in order to accomplish a common goal of keeping the facility open.

"We are not perfect," Becht said. "We are in a position to correct any of the deficiencies we may have."

After the hospital district board passed its resolution, community members were encouraged to continue their phone calls and letter-writing campaign to Florida Keys legislators and officials with CMS, who thus far have refused to compromise on keeping the facility open.

amswary@keysnews.com