My sister was a patient at Deer Meadows Short-term Rehabilitation Center 8301 Roosevelt Boulevard, Philadelphia, PA 19152 between September 1 and September 20 of 2023. Her care there was appalling.
When I visited my sister (for whom I act as healthcare proxy) I observed indifference and inattentiveness by the nursing staff. I was not surprised. PA State records show a 50 percent turnover among nurses in the past year. (I would be curious to know more about the credentialling of Deer Meadow "nurses".)
An example of inattentiveness was the day my sister was dropped while being transferred from her bed to a wheelchair while being taken to physical therapy. This event led to the social worker at Deer Meadows, Martina, filing what she called a formal grievance.
Another example was the consistently wrong meals delivered to my sister's room. Her doctor has her on a soft diet because of her current difficulties swallowing. Instead, my sister was regularly served beef or baked ham. One day she showed another visitor how she was unable to cut a piece of microwaved frozen fish. She picked it up and tapped it against the side of her tray to hear the sound it made.
The climax of my sister's stay came on September 20. She was transported that day to Jefferson Hospital for an appointment with her doctor. When she got there the transportation folks wheeled her to her doctor's office and walked out, leaving her. Finally, a Jefferson receptionist noticed her and called the doctor. He was alarmed at how her physical condition had deteriorated while at Deer Meadows. He sent her immediately to Jefferson's Emergency Department.
I never heard a word from Deer Meadows about my sister's admission to the hospital. No one called. No one even noticed that her room was empty.
A meeting I was scheduled to have with Martina, Deer Meadow's social worker, was still scheduled to happen the next day; the social worker did not know that my sister was gone either. When I arrived at the facility to retrieve my sister's clothing, I asked at the reception desk for her room number. I got it right away because they still listed my sister as present.
When I arrived at my sister's room I found that debris from the previous day's breakfast was still there on a tray beside her bed, untouched.
I went and found the head nurse, who appeared to know nothing about my sister's disappearance from her care. The nurse walked down to my sister's room to confirm that she was really not there.
"I guess someone should have called you," she said.
My sister, who died on October 16, told me more than once in her last weeks that "I went backward at Deer Meadows." I'm not sure what my next steps are. What I do know is that I want my sister's experience at Deer Meadows to be a formal complaint to the state of Pennsylvania so that no one else will ever have the experience she had. read more
