Families campaigning to save a council-owned care home described as being "like a lovely hotel" have been left "distraught" after health chiefs recommended its closure ahead of a crunch vote.
A report by by South Lanarkshire's director of health and social care, Professor Soumen Sengupta, said McClymont House in Lanark - together with Dewar House in Hamilton - should cease operating within seven months, with no new residents admitted.
If the councillors and NHS officials who sit on the region's Integrated Joint Board (IJB) vote to approve the recommendations at a meeting on March 26, the home's elderly residents - many with dementia - will be relocated.
Emma Koubayssi, whose 92-year-old grandmother has been a resident at McClymont for the past five years, said the relatives were "distraught".
She added: "The families are calling on all the IJB members to have the decency and care to vote against the closure and to look at alternatives to finding the small pot of money needed."
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Many fear that their loved ones will be moved out of the area because other residential homes in the Clydesdale region are already full with lengthy waiting lists.
The move comes despite an outcry from relatives and the local community, with more than 3,300 signing a petition to save McClymont.
Experts have also warned that the trauma of being uprooted to unfamiliar environment will worsen dementia symptoms and cut short some residents' lives.
According to a report by the independent advisory panel, who oversaw a three-month public consultation, residents of McClymont House "commented that it felt like a lovely hotel, whilst family members said it was like coming to visit a resident’s own house".
The home consistently scores high marks from inspectors and is one of the top-rated care homes in Scotland.
In its report, the panel added that "the overwhelming conclusion from those who took part in the consultation was that Dewar House and McClymont House should not be closed".
The proposals, first announced in September, are projected to save South Lanarkshire's health and social care partnership (HSCP) around £1.5 million a year - £786,000 from McClymont - amid a "recurrent funding gap" of £19.5m in its adult and older people's social care budget.
The HSCP suggested that the land could be re-purposed for "progressive" social housing, enabling people to stay in their own homes for longer.
However, the consultation report said many families were supportive of increased fees or automatically paying residents' Winter Fuel Payments direct to the homes to help cover costs.
Others questioned why under-occupied council buildings could not be closed instead given the large numbers of staff working from home.
The panel also highlighted criticism from family members who felt that IJB, council and NHS Lanarkshire staff "had displayed a lack of empathy" and "were only concerned about finances and that the wellbeing of the residents did not matter".
It added: "The overriding message from participants was that they believed the decision to close Dewar House and McClymont House had already effectively been made, and the consultation was a ‘tick box’ or ‘paper’ exercise to allow the closure to go ahead."
Staff from Dewar House and McClymont House were said to have "shared this distrust".
The report added: "They described being told in September 2023 that the closure would go ahead, and that this position was revised to the effect that there would be a consultation on the closure, leaving them confused as to whether the final decision had been made."
In his report to the IJB, Prof Sengupta said it "has a responsibility to set a balanced budget" and that re-provisioning residential care "has been assessed as providing a potential opportunity to reduce expenditure (and thus contribute to addressing the overall budget shortfall) with potentially more limited implications for the care of individuals and communities in comparison to other options".
If the IJB vote in favour of closure, arrangements will be made "to discontinue ongoing provision of residential care from both of these facilities over a seven month period".
Prof Sengupta added that the HSCP staff "have considerable experience in safely transferring residents when care homes have closed...thereby minimising disruption and distress".
He said: "Given the above, if a decision was taken to close the care homes, it would not be expected for there to be any adverse impact on the health and social care outcomes for each of the 21 long-term residents [of McClymont and Dewar House] directly affected."
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