The United Medical Center’s 120-bed skilled nursing facility will close for good, after it temporarily closed down in May because of the coronavirus pandemic.

At the time, skilled nursing residents were hurriedly transferred to other facilities in the District and Maryland. Now, those transfers — which advocates say may not have abided by legal guidelines governing permanent facility closures — will become permanent, as was first reported by The Washington Post.

The facility’s intent to close was finalized on June 24 by a vote of the Not-For-Profit Hospital Corporation’s Board of Directors, which oversees UMC, D.C.’s only public hospital.

“The Board vote was made after careful consideration of the ongoing COVID-19 public health emergency, the current status of the former residents of the nursing home, and the future of public health east of the Anacostia River,” a press release announcing the decision says.

Toya Carmichael, a spokeswoman for UMC, said in an email to DCist that former skilled nursing residents and their families have not yet been officially told that they won’t be able to return to the facility.

“As the hospital still needs to go through the official regulatory process of obtaining approval to close, the residents have not yet been notified,” she wrote.

The decision comes after D.C. unveiled plans earlier this spring for a new hospital at the St. Elizabeths campus and two new urgent care centers in Wards 7 and 8. Those buildings will replace UMC, which is scheduled to close in 2023. The new facilities will not include a skilled nursing facility.

That was part of the rationale for the Not-for-Profit Hospital Corporation Board’s decision.

“The reality that the District’s plan for the New Hospital Project does not include the operation of a skilled nursing facility led the Board to determine that a vote for permanent closure was best for patient safety, employee stability, and the long term continuum of care plans for the community,” the statement reads.

Advocates have long suspected that the closure of the skilled nursing facility might be made permanent. In May, Mark Miller, the director at the Legal Counsel for the Elderly’s Office of the D.C. Long-Term Care Ombudsman, told DCist he worried about what might happen to UMC nursing home residents in the long term, in light of the planned closure of UMC.

“Here’s my concern: because the city wants to close that building, they are using the coronavirus crisis to move all the nursing residents out, potentially to Maryland facilities, and that they will not be offered any opportunity to return after the pandemic is over,” Miller said. “This allows [the District] to avoid the problem of relocating people when they build the new hospital.”

Under District law, the process for shutting down a long-term care facility permanently includes a number of safeguards designed to give residents and their families a chance to weigh in on where they want to be moved to, and a chance to appeal if they don’t like the options they’ve been given. At the time of the transfer, there were 75 residents.

But the lead-up to the then-temporary transfer of United Medical Center’s skilled nursing residents was quick and chaotic, according to staff at the D.C. ombudsman’s office, which advocates for residents in long-term care settings in the District.

Albert Reed, who worked with residents and families in the lead-up to the transfers, expressed concerns about the degree of ‘transfer trauma’ associated with moving people on short notice.

“We’re talking about closing somebody’s house, packing them up and taking them to a new house,” he said. “That’s what this is.”

Former UMC residents were transferred to a number of facilities in D.C. and Maryland, many miles away from UMC’s location in Ward 8 and some far away from public transportation, according to the Post. Though there are two skilled nursing facilities in Ward 8 and one in Ward 7, the District already had a shortage of beds even before the closure at UMC, with hundreds of Washingtonians in facilities in Maryland.

Ward 7 Councilmember Vince Gray told The Washington Post that he expected to hold a hearing to examine whether UMC followed District law in moving residents out and then announcing the permanent closure of the skilled nursing unit.