Emerson Health and Rehabilitation Center

Despite our fears, mom’s recovery process was really amazing. Nurses and aides attended to all her needs, they were very kind and caring. Her occupational and physical therapists were outstanding. Their patience and encouragement helped us both a great deal. The facility is clean and beautiful and there were a lot of activities scheduled for my mother to attend.

Emerson Health and Rehab is very clean and has renovated areas for families to visit with their loved ones. It has good nursing procedures; the hospital even had a binder around my dad’s midsection to protect the feeding tube, so the nursing side of it is generally good, and the activities are reasonably good. The problem with it, from my point of view, is the rehabilitation department. They seem to give everybody a similar amount of time at rehab that is conucted without telling the families. I had to appeal twice, but you can’t even appeal through Medicare; I appealed for them to drop his swallowing therapy, and then Medicare told me that I can’t appeal it. However, the director of the place was nice enough to continue some swallowing therapy with him for a while, but I don’t think it is really state-of-the-art swallowing therapy; they don’t do enough of it to make a difference, I don’t think the dietician does her job at giving him a choice of pleasurable food -- just a tiny bit of something. They do not do language therapy for people who are stroke survivors, which I feel should be automatically done, so I would not send stroke survivors there. My dad is given compassionate, cheerful care for the most part. It is a cheerful environment, and it is clean; however, now there is starting to be a lot of staff turnover. Our favorite nurse is leaving in three days, and our favorite personal care attendant just left, so there are all these new people coming in. I don’t know what happened, but up to now, there have been some really good staff members. The problem is the 3:00 to 11:00 shift -- they are short-staffed, in my opinion. They need one more person, at least, because my dad is somewhat high-maintenance at night; he will initially refuse for five minutes, and then once he gets used to people and procedures, then he’ll say, “Oh, thank you, ma’am.” He can be difficult in the beginning if you don’t know him, so every night, I have been there to help with his night-time routine of getting his pajamas on and helping the aide a little bit. So, it’s got its pros and cons like every other place. It shouldn’t be a five-star; I think it should be a four-star because the rehab is so rude to me, which is unbelievable. There is a nice social worker, but you don’t get much help with discharge planning. It is a pleasant place to visit, because they have rotating activity therapy that repeats, like bingo held most nights of the week. It is cheerful and clean, but there is no consultation with doctors. You have to coordinate so many things yourself. I had to call the doctor so many times to get one short meeting with him.