SINGAPORE - A nursing home has lost its licence after failing to comply with requirements, including the taking of Covid-19 precautionary measures.

Thian Leng Old Folks Home, located near Changi Road, was penalised last Friday (July 31) for repeatedly flouting its licensing requirements and more recently, for failing to adhere to Covid-19 safeguards for its residents and staff, said the Ministry of Health (MOH) in response to queries from The Straits Times at the weekend.

It said: "MOH has noted a rising number of non-compliances since May 2019, resulting in closer monitoring of the home. However, many of these non-compliances continued to remain unresolved during subsequent inspections.

"In 2020, MOH also noted areas of non-compliance related to Covid-19 precautionary measures that were required to be implemented to safeguard staff and residents from the Covid-19 infection."

The revoking of the licence comes even after the ministry had supported and assisted the home by seconding professional staff to the 70-bed facility on at least four occasions.

The support actions were meant to help strengthen the clinical oversight, care processes and operations, and to provide guidance on measures to be implemented to address the home's lapses, said the ministry.

It added: "Despite the assistance provided, we continued to detect lapses in care standards which placed the well-being and safety of their residents at risk. A significant portion of the improvements introduced by the home were also not sustained.

"As such, the home's licence was revoked on July 31, 2020, to ensure the safety and well-being of residents are not put at risk."

Alternative care arrangements have been made for all the residents in the home, including placing them in other nursing homes, and MOH and the Agency for Integrated Care have helped to facilitate the re-employment of staff to other nursing homes.

Mr Liu Kim Beng, 60, chairman of the home's management committee, told ST on Monday that there were about 60 residents and more than 10 foreign employees who were moved to other care facilities.

The ministry said the home operator can apply for a new licence to manage and run a nursing home in the future, if it is able to meet the requirements.

The nursing home manager, Ms Susan Lee, 55, said the home was told on June 2, a day after the end of the circuit breaker period, that its licence would be revoked.

Ms Lee, who has worked at the home since 2001, said: "We thought we had rectified the issues and also told the authorities that we would be dealing with some of the lapses once the circuit breaker ended."

Mr Liu said the Covid-19-related lapses were discovered during an audit amid the circuit breaker period. They included issues with the format of the forms that visitors to the home were required to fill out and also safe distancing protocols for its residents, said Mr Liu.

"They were technically not so serious... We did not have any Covid-19 cases among our residents and staff," he said.

When asked to give details on the non-compliance issues that MOH highlighted last year, Mr Liu said one of them involved the installation of a fire door.

On the lapses in clinical and care processes that the ministry had raised, he said: "We don't want to comment too much as MOH has already come out with their explanation - we respect that and don't feel that it's unfair. This is the system, and we will have to follow."

Mr Liu said the home intends to reapply for a licence to start operations again. "Some family members of residents have been calling to ask when we will get our licence back again. So during this period we will rethink and rework our processes, and make them better," he said.

Nursing homes emerged as an area of concern after the Lee Ah Mooi Old Age Home was identified as a cluster in April when 16 residents and staff caught the virus.

Strict protocols to minimise the risk of infection were put in place then that included barring all visitors from the homes.

The measures have since been relaxed after Singapore entered the second phase of reopening, and each resident is allowed to have one visitor a day for up to 30 minutes.