craigdailypress.com

Question: How important is a nursing home to our community?

Nancy Muldoon: "The importance of a nursing home for our community is very high. Since we are a rural community, we need to have our elderly in a nursing home near us rather than far away.

Interaction with people in nursing homes is very important to all ages of our community.

Our own children often visited great aunts and grandmothers in nursing homes. They were able to talk with, hug and kiss these fragile relatives. My husband brought his mother to our community where we lived so that he could visit her everyday.

Currently CNCC is training CNAs and RNs in Craig. By having a nursing home here in Craig, we can assure many of the CNCC graduates will stay in Craig rather than moving to another community.

Red Courtner: "The question is a given -- we certainly need this problem to be resolved as soon as possible. I think everyone in the county owes a debt of gratitude to those people involved in getting a nursing home operational, as we all know we should be caring for our senior citizens."

Glenda Bellio: "The residents who choose to live their lives here did not do so just so they could be moved out at the end. I feel that a nursing home and extended care facility is very important to this community.

The current situation does not overly concern me. I believe that desire to have one is strong enough that if we just give it a little time, there are private groups out there that will re-establish one.

In the mean time, I know this does seriously inconvenience some people. But if that's what it takes to make it better than please bear with us. Or better yet, get with those people featured in the paper and help work toward a solution.

This sounds terrible to say but one good thing to come out of all of this is that it helped remind people how important a facility of that nature is. Too often we take them for granted or just refuse to think about them at all until we need them.