Sodalis Elder Living

My mom recently moved to Heartland Village. After a few weeks of observing, I, too, noticed very little engagement with residents. Mostly, the residents either sit in their room or in the community living room passively.

The memory care group should be more tranparent and open as it relates to activities they have for residents. My loved one has lived there for sometime and all I ever see is the residents sitting in the living room area staring off in space. I see very little engagement from the staff or care givers.

This is a nice facility but at the moment seems a little under staffed. My senior is not very mobile and would really have benefited by a smaller facility. The staff is friendly but also very busy. The service is personalized and as we haven't been there long we are still getting used to what is done automatically and what is not. Seems more oriented to a fairly mobile seniors although they say they have every level including to the grave care. They are very willing to work with me and the nursing and administration staff is very good.

This is one of the places we toured when we were looking. While I was impressed with the staff, and their knowledge base. The state of the facility, and the overall cleanliness, detracted us from choosing them. We were also shown empty rooms that were in transition, and I think seeing a model room or even a current residents room and being able to see what that would look like, rather than an empty dirty room, would have been more helpful.

Overall Elmcroft of Carrollwood is a nice place, but I do think there are a few areas they could work on. The facility itself and the apartments are both nice looking and well kept, and the staff and residents all seem friendly. However, they recently went through a change of management and things still seem a bit rocky for the administration. I feel like they could have done a lot more to make the billing and move-in process clearer, I felt like I was on my own for a lot of that process.

The personnel that took care of my loved one were excellent, and they took good care of him. I wasn't all that happy with the management part, they didn't seem to have real good communication between them, and we caught them in several lies. One person would tell us one thing and another person would tell us something else. They weren't very consistent about the rules, and what you were allowed to have and not have. We had a small amount of money missing, at one point, and while they took care of it, it was still disconcerting. Everything was kept clean. Everybody there was pretty friendly. The lady that runs it was sometimes not all that friendly when she disagreed with us. The facility itself is beautiful and full of sunlight, except the memory care, it was dark and kind of tomb like. When my loved one fell and went to the hospital they never got in contact with us to check on us, and when our loved one passed away, and nobody even said anything about it. The food was pretty good. They had music on a weekly basis, and memory care is only included in some of the activities, the activities weren't daily in memory care. They would sit down and play games and do art. If you can put up with the management they take good care.

Met with activities director on weekend; contact person had not received info to meet; facility overall clean but a little older & larger than I wanted for my mom; keeping this in mind as a second choice...

no alert availability other than in room

Our loved one was here for about a month before we moved him to another community. He required a lot of attention with his medication, and they never really accommodated his needs. We were never able to get a doctor through them either. Besides the medical issues, the community was homey, it had good food, and the staff was friendly. It just was not the right fit for him, but it could easily be for someone else.

Our basic level is $74 a day and that is a shared apartment. Each resident has their own bedroom and share a common area. The private suites start at $100 a day. Does he qualify for Medicaid? We also take that. Medicaid pays for a shared suite. The price also depends on his level of care. $74 is the basic level then it goes up to $90, $116 and $126.

I think they could have done more. No one informed us when he was refusing his medication. We are not in the same the state so the communication was lacking, that needs to be improved. I would like someone to call me when something out of norm happens. They told us they would take them once a week or so on day trips, we didn't find that was happening as often as they made it sound, but they do some thing like bingo and card games and such there. The food is excellent, he does like food. The facilities and the staff, the openness to help were reasons we chose them. I saw that they were interested in seeing how they could help and make things easier, the impression I got was a little deceiving especially when it comes to communication.

THE ROOMS WERE SMALL AND EXPENSIVE BUT WE LIKED THE PATIO'S

Great living environment. Cool staff. Very clean.

I don't think it would be a good idea for her to have a kitchenette in her room and it looks like, by their description, every room has one.

Great living environment. Cool staff. Very clean. A bit costly.

A nice facility with a very interactive staff. There was a slight odor near the laundry area. This was also slightly above our price range.

This is very nice facility. medication mgmt/laundry/grooming asssistance extra,reminders to bath and grooming not extra, one-time fee for wrist/ankle band for "wanderers" safety door lock feature.

While our loved one has been there this community has gone through many changes. The food in the beginning was okay, but now it has just gone downhill. The value is right on point and luckily we were able to get in at a discounted rate, however we now are having issues with the billing side of things. Also, a lot of the staff members there are temp workers.

My parents lived there for four months. We moved them out because they didn't receive the high level of service they were promised. During the sales meeting they will tell you that the transition to assisted living can be difficult for some people, but they don't explain that it's more than an emotional transition and they don't make an effort to help you avoid transitional difficulties. Our main issue was medication management. My parents are on a lot of meds. They told us to bring in the meds on the day they moved in. We did, but then they withheld meds for several days while they attempted to get orders from the physicians. All of that could have been done before move-in, but they made no effort to do that. Any time I took my parents to a physician and received new meds, it was difficult to get them to dispense the meds if I didn't have a written doctor's order. Near the end of our 4 months they finally gave us a form for the doctor to fill out when we went, but that should have been provided the day we moved in! They often waited until only 3 or 4 doses of medication were left before reordering, but my parents used a mail service (as do many residents) that would take 7-10 days for an order to arrive. That meant that they would need to order from a local pharmacy, which increased the cost to my parents. When I moved my parents out I had two prescriptions I had to get locally because they had failed to order from the mail order service in sufficient time for me to have more than about 4 days' worth of the medications. Also, there was more than one occasion when my mother had to instruct the med tech on the medication or delivery method for a medication for herself or my dad. Thank goodness my mother had the mental capacity to know what was supposed to happen and could report the need for a correction! Be aware that something like a change in the texture of the resident's food (for example a soft food diet) or a crush order for medication because of a dental issue also requires a doctor's order. Again, they don't make you aware of that before you go, so it's a hassle to get the order after you return and in the meantime, they refuse to provide soft food or crush medication. The poor processes and lack of accountability are horrendous. There were many instances when staff didn't answer call buttons in a timely manner. Once my mother missed a doctor's appointment even though she had done everything in advance to let them know about the appointment, but the driver didn't know she had signed up because he was out for several days when she signed up, and they had no backup process in place. Because the laundry equipment couldn't handle the laundry load, clothes were sometimes returned damp. On one occasion my mother was told to hang her clothes so they could dry. To address the equipment problem they chey changed laundry days but didn't let all the residents know. Someone was assigned the responsibility of informing residents, but passed that responsibility on to someone else, and then the second person didn't do it, and there was no process in place to check behind the staff. The dining room service is good most of the time, but there were occasions when my parents were taken to the dining room for a meal, then had to sit for more than an hour because the cooking staff was behind. They charge a $2000 non-refundable payment per person. I'm sure other facilities do something similar, but if the service is terrible like we experienced, then you don't get it back even though you consistently reported issues. So, we paid $6300/month for both of my parents, but you can add to that another $1000/month because of the non-refundable charge. I was very involved in my parents' care, going by almost daily and on some occasions several times per day. Elmcroft is only 7 minutes from my home, but if we ever feel the need for assisted living again, this is NOT the place I would choose. I felt that I had done some serious research before we selected Elmcroft, I went prepared with a long set of questions, and I checked reviews and ratings. But still, it wasn't enough. I'm now adding questions to my question list for the future.

Could not get a straight answer on items that appeared on my bill. Director is not friendly or easy to discuss issues with. Cleaning staff and wait staff are extremely nice and very personable. They are the reason I keep my loved one here.