Sunnyside Gardens Sunnyvale, CA

I already found a place for my husband. The name of it is Sunnyside Gardens. I fell in love with it. It is all one level. It is extremely clean. The caretakers are very, very good. The food is excellent. I would recommend it to anyone. What I like about this place is its cleanliness and the caretakers. I'm absolutely satisfied with them. One of the things that is nice, they also have a bus service. With my husband being in a wheelchair and he has to go into Kaiser tomorrow, they will take him. That's a big relief for me. Also they have an activity center and they have something going on all day long. They have TV, coloring, exercise, and puzzles. On top of that, they had Elvis impersonator came out and they have a high school band that came out. They had lady dancers. They have a tremendous amount of activities. The dining room is great. There are plenty of seats. It is spacious. The care tenders bring the food and set them up. The food is so good. With regards to room, my husband has a shared room because it is $1000 cheaper. It is absolutely adequate for him. In fact, we took our recliner out there for him. There is plenty of room. If anybody asks me, I can't tell enough good about this place.

Sunnyside Gardens Assisted Living had some exceptional care staff and a good many that were mediocre. They have a rotating staff, and apparently, they don't compensate their staff well, so it's like a rotating door with a few exceptions. You have constant change in staff. I did not find them particularly well-trained and certainly not in the special needs of my father. He is mature, and that means his skin is fragile. I spent three sessions before admission detailing his life, our life, and his needs pre-admission, and I was assured that they could be addressed. They represented themselves as a small boutique, very individual-oriented, and yet I did not have a game plan ever legitimately presented to me for extending his platform for the memory issues, for the dementia onset. Frankly, I think, in retrospect, it was a mistake on my part in that he was certainly not very near the higher functioning, as the folks in there were. I would leave him at night in bed, and when I would come the next afternoon, he'd have some cuts on his legs that the care staff had not addressed. I did not find it a well-managed organization. I think their community director, Tanya, was fabulous. But we left not satisfied. The chaos in their memory care dining room was just agitating to my dad. He was a great deal more competent than they were prepared to address, like placing him in memory care. He should not have been placed in memory care initially. Yes, he had memory issues, but he would have been much better served in assisted living.