Pinicon Place

My Mom loves her room at Pinicon Place, It is a very clean, bright and a very friendly place. It is fun to visit her, she has been In other facilities that were not like Pinicon and it was not pleasant to visit. My Mom loves that she doesn’t have to cook, clean or do laundry and she loves doing activities with the other residents/friends. It is so sweet, the residents all look out for each other, and make sure they are going to eat or activities. My Mom feels very special being able to get her hair and nails done once a week, she feels like a queen. You see my Mom worked very hard on the farm, most of the time did her own hair and very rarely until her senior years was able to have her nails painted, due to chores. Our family very much appreciates the care and concern that is shown to our Mom at Pinicon. If you ask her any given day, she will say “They treat me like a Queen”, and we could not be happier!

My parents are in Pinicon Place. The experience has been good. We choose it mainly because of the location. It is an assisted living place but has mostly single rooms and two rooms that adjoin. It seems clean, and the people who are there are caring, friendly, and helpful. The food is OK sometimes. The can improve on the food and try to engage the residents in activities.

The staff here is very, very caring. The facility is newly remodeled and looks very nice. They have numeous activities daily for the residents and they all seemed to be very happy here. I was very pleased with the level of care my family member recieved here!

I have extremely negative feelings about Silvercrest. My family chose this facility as it was close to where her family lived. My father visited the facility before placing her there and found the staff to be friendly and supportive. This was a very traumatic and upsetting experience for my grandmother, who did not wish to be put in a home and did not understand that this was in her best interest. She went into a severe depression almost immediately, and her dementia got even worse. Upon moving her to Silvercrest, she was placed in a double occupancy room - which my family was told would not be the case. Within a short amount of time, they were able to move her to her own room, but it was so tiny that she could barely move around. The rooms were very cold and barren. My father was promised that when a larger room opened up, which they expected to happen very shortly, that she would be next in line. Our plan was to decorate the larger room similar to her home so she could be surrounded by more of her things - which would make her feel more at ease. Unfortunately, the staff forgot about that they had promised my grandmother this room and moved a new resident into the room the moment it became available, never mentioning another word about it. My grandmother had no privacy in her room on the particular ward that she was on. As she was on the dementia unit, various other residents who were extremely intrusive would wander into her room, some would get in her face and ramble at her, others would steal her belongings. One particular woman would shuffle the hallway along the walls from the moment she woke up until she was put to bed at night. This woman used my grandmother's room to turn around, would walk straight through her door and walk the perimeter of her bed and the walls of her room before walking back out the door. Some residents would burst into her room crying and screaming, or would simply stand in front of her bed for long periods of time, staring at her. This seemed to be accepted by staff, and nothing was ever done about it, despite our complaints. Soon my grandmother wanted to be left alone so badly that she became violent with other residents and staff, for which she was restrained and put on high doses of medication. She was never the same again. She soon lost recognition of her family- and during times when she would remember us she would simply fall to her knees and beg to be taken home. Despite my father's concerns, he was told by staff that this was normal behavior and that it would soon get better. My grandmother's health soon declined rapidly and she was put on hospice. My father called me one day stating that I should visit her as soon as possible - as they did not feel that she had much time left (perhaps only hours). When I arrived to Silvercrest that day the staff greeted me warmly, and my father said that the hospice nurses had so far been very attentive and helpful. I arrived to her room and she had labored breathing and was barely conscious. At change of shift a new hospice person (who had never cared for my grandmother before) entered the room. She was doing her best to answer the questions of my family and meet my grandmother's needs, but I feel that her demeanor was uncaring and very cold. I was watching my grandmother very intently during those last moments, and just as she was taking her very last breaths, the hospice nurse was speaking (extremely loudly) about how she was probably going to die that day, and what the signs would be that she was starting to pass. I had to turn to the hospice nurse and ask her to please shut her mouth, as my grandmother was dying at that very moment - and I wanted everyone to be quiet. After my grandmother passed she left the room to give us some time with her - but she propped the door of her room wide open. Residents were still shuffling in and out of our room even as the nurses stood just outside in the hallway - and no one did anything to stop them. To make matters worse, I could hear the hospice nurse and the Silvercrest staff RNs joking and laughing at the top of their lungs in the hallway - seemingly taking their lunch break together DIRECTLY outside of our room as we all huddled around my grandmother's bed, crying. We were holding her hand and hugging each other - it was supposed to be a peaceful moment, or at least a time for our family to grieve, and reflect - but all of this was interrupted by roars of laughter coming from the hallway from the nurses. I was in disbelief, and extremely irate. My father kept me from saying anything to them and told me to let it go. I can't say that during the year that my grandmother was at Silvercrest that she was treated with cruelty - in fact, I'm sure that staff at this facility did the best that they could. But I'm still mortified by how insensitive the staff had been on the day of her death. They made it seem as though she were very unimportant, and did not take our feelings into consideration in the slightest. I wish that we had been able to put her in a facility that was slightly more caring than this one was. I do not feel that they ever truly made an attempt to make her feel comfortable living there, and I would not recommend this facility to anyone. My grandmother was not treated with the respect that she deserved, and the bottom line is that they should be showing more compassion for the residents and their families. Allowing her to die with a bit of dignity - and perhaps just for an hour or so preventing other residents from barging into her room would have been nice - and the least they could have done for us was to give us a few moments of peace and quiet to say goodbye to her the way we wanted to after she passed. Instead of remembering this as a quiet moment, I will always remember those nurses who could not contain their fits of laughter just outside of my grandma's room just moments after she died. Shame on them. Grandma, I love you dearly and I miss you.