Gulfside Center for Hospice Care

My wife has been gone for 10 months now and I’m still bothered by the actions of Gulfside Hospice in New Port Richey. My wife had been fighting terminal liver cancer for 3 ½ years, then she fell and broke her hip. After a stay in the hospital and a attempt at rehab she was transferred to Gulfside hospice in- patient facility on Kentucky Ave In New Port Richey . I was told by the hospice doctor that with liver cancer things will be steady for a few days then she will go downhill pretty quick. The personnel there were excellent and they kept my wife very comfortable in regards to her hip surgery and bedsores and cancer. A week later the hospice doctor called and said they were going to transfer her to a nursing home that day because she has been “stable” for awhile , and possibly she was mis- diagnosed . She was transferred to a nursing home in New Port Richey, and put in a room with another patient. The nursing home had trouble getting medication for her and my wife was suffering and in pain. I don't know how they can say she is under hospice care at this point , unless you count the hospice nurse that travels from facility to facility. A nursing home can't take care of a dying patient like a hospice in-patient facility ,and that is what my wife deserved. While my wife was still alert she was in pain and uncomfortable and I thought that was what a hospice was supposed to take care of. I asked if my wife could be transferred back and was told no. My wife died four days later. I believe she was moved for administrative or monetary reasons because she should never have been transferred out of the gulfside in-patient facility, and as far as I’m concerned , the only mis-diagnosis was from the doctor at Gulfside. I would have fought the transfer but the glimmer of a mis- diagnostic gave me hope that she might live a little longer stopped me from doing so. I thought I was doing the correct thing by putting my wife into Hospice hands and now I have to live the rest of my life knowing that my wife died in a nursing home uncomfortable and not at peace.

My father in law was just recently there who is stage 4 terminal cancer and they did not care for him properly at all. No compassion by most of the staff and not sure what credentials they even have. Very unprofessional! I have a list of complaints but bottom line is..if you have a dying loved one...please don't take them here!

If your loved one stays for three days you will be asked to leave unless they are in a coma. Then they want to send you to one of their long term care facilities. Do not go into this blindfolded by promises of a peaceful end of life. Remember if your loved one doesn’t decline quickly (within 3 days) even if they are terminal they will transport you out of here. They will not tell you this when they talk to you at first. They will not mention it until the day before they want to move your loved one. If your loved one eats a minimal amount of food a day (chicken broth, sherbet, four strawberries) they are too alive to be here. They want your loved one to come in comatose and leave dead so you can receive a pin service. Beautiful place but they do not adhere to their motto.

From the start, I was not impressed. The nurse who came to our home to initiate my mother reeked of cigarette smoke and had a chronic cough further jeopardizing my mother's already compromised immune system. Upon my arrival to hospice, after my mother was transported to their center from the hospital, I was told she had not arrived yet - Immediately, provoking me to think she did not survive the commute. As I was shown the room she would be staying in, I found her tucked away, out of view, behind a room partition. When I asked the nurses to help straighten my mother's body into an up right position (she could no longer move herself), they both just stared at her for an indecent amount of time. Whether they were contemplating the approach or not, I found the action to be very unnerving. I finally had to ask what they were simply staring at. To put the proverbial icing on the cake, I had explicitly requested not to have any pain medicine administered, as this was my mother's wish. The nurse shoved morphine into her mouth when my mother began to cry out for me. As my mother was dying, the same nurse who administered the unwanted pain medicine, casually told me: "I knew she would die tonight, but I didn't think it would be this soon, keep talking to her", and walked out of the room. Perhaps if I was more accustomed to the death of a loved one, these words would not have pained me so much to hear as they were dripping with desensitized indifference. The ONLY good things I can say about my 48 hour experience with hospice - decent facility and Tiffany, the hospice liaison my mother met at the hospital, had more compassion than anyone I encountered during this horrible situation.