Wickshire Deer Park

Wickshire Deer Park was an older place and needed some updating. The lady said that they're going to do some updating, though. The second floor kind of smelled like urine. Some of the rooms that I was shown didn't have a toilet in it, so they needed to do a lot of repairs in the place. The people were very nice. I talked to some of the residents and they seemed to be happy there. It was a friendly environment, and it looked like they were able to gather and socialize. They had an area where people could sit and they had bird feeders out. They had big windows, so they could sit there and watch the birds, and that was kind of nice. The dining room was pretty spacious. It's just the walk to get to the dining facility was a little bit long from the assisted living rooms.

My mom was in Wickshire Deer Park. They're terrible. She had bed bugs in her room. She got bitten. I wouldn't recommend them to anyone. They just took over from another place, they kept changing hands where she was. At first, they were nice, but over time with all the different management that came in, the last one was Wiltshire. They just moved in, and like two weeks later, they said that my mom had declined rapidly due to COVID, which wasn't true. Even the hospital said that wasn't true and they didn't even know her basically at that point. They didn't even know what she was like before. So how can they make that call? And they didn't call and ask me if they could send her to the emergency room. They just sent her to the emergency room. And then they said that they don't have the services there to provide for my mother anymore. That was a lie too, they just kicked her out. That was how they got rid of her because she was a Medicaid waiver. It disrupted her life, and she ended up in the emergency room with constipation because she was so upset because of the change. She didn't know what was going on, and I had to go down there in the middle of winter and try to figure stuff out after we got her in another place. It was a horrible experience for my family. It was dreadful. The food was terrible, it all came out of a can, and they acted as some dieticians did it, but it's awful. I don't think all the people were bad like they had some people from before that stayed on as the new management team came in. But the new management team sent her to the emergency room without even calling me. They should have never done that. They should have called me first and they could have. They said they had to check if she had a UTI. I found out later, you can do that in the nursing home. You don't need to send them to the hospital for that. That was their excuse. So it was just a way to get her out. The room is just your standard Medicaid waiver room. It's a studio. It had a little kitchenette and a bathroom. I wouldn't say it was terrible, but the fact that they just let it deteriorate to getting bedbugs. The other thing that was so awful was when I was saying, "Well, what's going to happen to her stuff? I need to make sure that it gets to a storage locker because she has family photos in there. And then they said, " Well, she has bedbugs." Like she manufactured the bedbugs herself somehow like it was her fault she had bedbugs. And I thought that was outrageous because if she had bedbugs, I'm sure a lot of other residents had bedbugs in there.

My parents lived at Wickshire Deer Park. It was positive; however, the staff was overwhelmed with the COVID-19 situation. They were not equipped for my mom's needs, but that's just who they are. They weren't meant to do Alzheimer's care. They had a memory care unit but it was not acceptable for my mom. I don't really have anything negative to say about them, it just wasn't the right place anymore. The room was very nice. Activities were off and on, and they were not some things that my mom understood to go to, but that all goes back to her needing more care than what they were equipped to do. The activities were adequate. My dad liked the food OK, but my mother didn't. It was just a matter of taste. They offered nutritious and balanced food, maintenance and cleanliness were good, too. They cleaned my parents' little apartment at least once a week. They wiped off counters and cleaned the bathrooms; however, they needed to improve on communications with the family.

My mother is here. It's really homey, really nice, it has a lot of activities, and my mom is really happy there. She's made a lot of improvements since she got there. My mom likes the food and it's very clean.