It took me a while to post this review. I didn't want to revisit this place in my memory because of…read moresuch a terrible experience, but I finally decided to share it in the hope of helping future patients and residents.
If you are working with a case manager who promises you that this is a core center and the best facility, please do not believe a word of it.
On my first day there, I witnessed a patient getting up from a wheelchair, falling, and scraping the back of his head against a wall while the nurses simply sat there watching. I was the one who rushed to help him up.
My dad was sent there to recover from a hospital procedure that had caused inflammation. He lasted only seven days before suffering from an infection.
They put my dad in a room with two other patients. It was a very small room with a dirty curtain and such a foul smell that I actually threw up when I visited.
On the second night, they called me at 2 a.m. to tell me they had found Dad on the floor and didn't know how he could have fallen. Keep in mind that his bed had rails, but the bed was broken.
After a meeting with the staff, who eagerly promised to provide several services, including diligent monitoring of Dad's feeding tube and TPN (total parenteral nutrition) feeding, speech therapy, and an activities specialist, I never saw any of them at Dad's bedside. They made promises, but none of them were kept.
At one point, a nurse's aide tried to remove Dad's dirty, soiled gown, but it became tangled around his feeding tube. She asked the attending nurse to help remove it. The next day, when I came to see Dad, his gown was still attached to the tube. It had remained that way overnight.
Dad's TPN feeding bag needed to be replaced, but the replacement was delayed by 10 hours. Dad depended on that bag for his nutrition because he was not eating by mouth like the other patients. Sure enough, there was no feeding bag, just a dirty gown wrapped around the tube.
Dad then suffered a severe infection and was rushed to Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, just two blocks away. He had a TPN PICC line infection, which I believe was caused by the nursing home's negligence. Even the hospital ER doctor told us that the nursing home had a reputation for sending patients to the emergency room in poor condition and neglecting their care.
When we returned the next morning to collect Dad's belongings, we signed a form instructing the nursing home to close his account. Despite this, they tried to charge us $2,000 for keeping Dad's bed for a few days. I had to have a very firm conversation with the billing department before they finally acknowledged that I had signed the form and removed the charges.
Meanwhile, they were harassing me about the bill while my dad was fighting for his life at UCLA. There was no compassion or apparent remorse, even though they were clearly in the wrong and had miscommunicated with their own staff.
Please, if you ever have to place a loved one in a nursing home, no matter how short the stay, do your research. Do not blindly trust your case manager's recommendations. Visit the facility beforehand, and trust your instincts. If the place is dirty and the staff are busier celebrating a potluck than attending to the residents' needs, take that as a serious warning sign.
SUNNYSIDE IS HELL--THERE IS NOTHING SUNNY ABOUT THIS PLACE.