My elderly, housebound husband was a client of Mad River Home Health Services for several months…read more He has Parkinson's and had broken his hip 3 months before. He'd arrived home from a rehab in the Bay Area days before with a severe, infected and potentially limb-threatening pressure sore.
The first nurse they sent to our home was disturbed. She raved and screamed at us before storming out of the house without treating my husband. It was a shocking and horrifying experience. As if that weren't bad enough, she then told her supervisor that we were hoarders and you can't even turn around in our house, and that is why she'd left. It wasn't true. Mad River Home Health Services even repeated this to the social worker at the rehab my husband had been at. It was humiliating and deeply inappropriate.
After I complained to the hospital, Mad River Home Health then decided to send a new nurse out and to try again. This nurse was lovely, as were most of the other nurses, an OT and one particular PT who came to our home. They were all kind and professional. My one star is not for them.
It is for the administration of Mad River Home Health. After the initial horrifying start with the unhinged nurse, things went fairly well for several weeks. Until one day when one of the nurses made an odd comment about the budget. My husband, she said, was one of their neediest cases. He was using up too much of their budget. Things would be changing.
And then the nightmare began again. One of the nurses was sent to our house with a list of demands that we were to follow. I was to sign it. If I didn't sign it, the patient care manager threatened me that she would withdraw my husband's care. The list was bizarre. It included things that were not in my husband's best interest. I refused to sign it.
My husband had been scheduled to have a bath aide come. It was going to be his one and only bath help visit, even though it was a service he'd actually needed and that he'd been entitled to. He had been looking forward to it.
The patient care manager called me up and told me that since I hadn't signed the list of demands, then my husband would not be allowed a bed bath -- she cancelled his bed bath! She also told me that she had talked to my doctor and he had agreed to this. She again threatened to revoke my husband's care.
Mind you, my husband had a severe pressure sore and disabling mobility problems. Without home health, his foot may have wound up being amputated or worse. So these threats to revoke his care were frightening, on a deep and visceral level.
Then I got a call from our doctor a couple of days later. "What the heck is going on?," he asked. He'd been sent a weird list of demands that home health wanted him to sign. He'd never seen anything like it.
The patient care manager had lied. She'd never spoken to our doctor. Once she realized she couldn't enlist him in helping to bully us, the threats quietly went away and the visits continued, but less frequently. She let my husband have his one bath visit. One bed bath. In over 5 months.
We lived in fear of home health, afraid if we inadvertently did something that displeased one of the nurses that the patient care manager's threats and bullying would start again.
The other issue was the physical therapist. The person who'd actually come to our house most of the time and did most of the hands-on work was wonderful. He was very helpful to my husband. The problem was his supervisor. After my husband's initial two months with PT, he was still improving. He very obviously still needed the PT. He had progressed to the point he was able to use a walker again, barely. He was just beginning to learn how to safely go down the stairs in the entryway of our house. He was just getting to the point of learning how to get in and out of the car again. My husband told me he had a really good feeling about his recovery -- he was getting better, and he thought he was going to pull through this. My husband was still clearly benefitting from the PT. A health professional I know told me that it would be detrimental if his PT stopped then.
His PT could have continued if the PT supervisor would have authorized it. She refused, despite the obvious necessity. After it ended, my husband rapidly lost the ability to use a walker. The last day he left the house with me was the day the PT supervisor cancelled his care. He lost his still-growing ability to get to or enter the car after that. At that point he also basically lost the will to live. He rapidly reversed course. After home health ended (the nursing visits continued beyond the PT), he was enrolled in hospice.
They sent a disturbed and inappropriate nurse to our house. Then the patient care manager bullied us and made the whole situation far more stressful than it should have been. Then the PT supervisor hastened my husband's terminal decline through her unwillingness to sign off on a piece of paper.
