Vitality Living

Beware - your loved one could be kicked out for exhibiting typical Alzheimers behavior, and you will lose your exorbitant move in fee

All seemed well when my parents moved in to Atria Evergreen Woods. My mom was in independent living and dad in memory care. The staff in memory care was very kind to both my parents. However, under their care he developed raw wounds on his groin area. This led to his being aggressive when being cleaned. To be fair, he was on medication for aggressiveness but until the wounds appeared he wasn't a problem. Long story short they decided he needed psychiatric care to change his meds (no one mentioned the groin wounds) Rather than allowing the medication change time to take affect, they Baker Acted my father against his family's strenuous objections. They put an 85 year old alzheimer's patient in a psych hospital not capable of caring for patients with memory issues. Dad had no idea why he was moved, couldn't communicate with the staff and they only allowed my mother to say goodbye to him because they needed her to give them dad's information. For better or worse, he was transferred to a regular hospital the next day due to pnemonia that wasn't noticed by the Cedar Wood staff. The hospital psychiatrist thankfully rescinded the Baker Act but the damage was done. Dad stayed in the hospital for 2 weeks and never really recovered from the whole experience. He died 6 weeks later. When he left Cedar Wood for the Baker Act, he was walking and eating his meals with assistance. When I made it to the hospital 2 days later, he was barely conscious. ALSO.. the hospital staff were the ones to point out to me his severe groin sores. They said no wonder he was aggressive. It took the hospital all of the two weeks to get his sores healed. Those were a result of the care he received at Cedar Wood and his resulting bad behaviour was treated by Baker Acting him. On another cautionary note, upon his release from the hospital, I moved both parents closer to me. However, due to the Baker Act on my father's record, it was almost impossible to find a care facility to take him. As for the independent care side, it was nice for mom but when she became ill with a flu that quarrantined several areas of the facility,t hey did not care for her as I was led to believe they would. They would bring her breakfast then not check on her until 7 that night. When I called to see what the protocol was for independent care when the person got sick, I was told that they would be assisted with meals for a few days, that's why living there was so great. I had to call the marketing director of the facility to get them to bring my mom a drink and soup, two days in a row. So, it is a nice place to live until your relative develops an issue.

When we were looking for care options for our loved one we were very explicit with Atria about the severity of our loved ones movement difficulties and that we thought she may not qualify here, and they said they'd do an evaluation to make sure she was appropriate for the community. After the evaluation they said it wouldn't be a problem. Within a few days of her moving in they called us and said we'd need to bring in private help since her care level was too high. We had to pay exorbitant fees for a few weeks while we searched for another community to place her in, in addition to the large entry fee charged by Atria. After speaking with a few social workers we learned that this behavior is a pattern for Atria Springdale, and they actually warn families away from them for this specific reason. So be very careful about trusting the results of their evaluations.