Otterbein Skilled Nursing & Rehab

Otterbein is good. The place itself is small and very open. The cleanliness is very good. It is very much like a regular home. When you walk in, there is a fireplace, and a kitchen to the left. They serve three meals a day. You can also converse and read your newspaper at the long kitchen table. There are only ten residents. They have a permanent staff there. They have different kinds of therapy and activities. They go out to lunch, they have someone come in a couple of times a week to do crafts, and they also have exercise classes. They have televisions and films, and there's a porch and a patio too.

Our stay was horrible. My mother was actually afraid of some of the staff as they would berate or belittle her for needing help. Though they touted their "care method" of low # of patients to staff, that meant nothing when staff was busy doing the cooking and the cleaning and the shopping. So if there was 1 STNA to 5 patients, once you added all the other things to it it might as well have been 20 patients to 1 staff. And they were always short staffed. My mother sometimes waited over an hour to be changed or removed from a bedpan. There was no dietary or nutrition standards so my mother, on a diabetic and colonoscopy diet, was served everything wrong and we were told that they didn't "cater to special needs'. And because the staff was responsible for the cooking, sometimes they went straight from cleaning someone to finishing a meal. My mothers meals were nearly always cold and was never accommodated (rather belittled) when she asked for things to be reheated. SHE JUST STOPPED EATING. At one point the staff did not recognize she was seriously sick and the squad had to be called for a life-threatening illness. Our family was more than happy to get her out of there. I highly do NOT recommend this place unless they change their horrible model. There is no way a place like that should charge what they charge for the level of service and performance they offer. The outside sure is nice while the inside is deplorable.

Otterbein was extremely nice and more of a residence type location rather than a typical nursing facility. It has a common kitchen area surrounded by the private rooms. There were about 7 or 8 residences all in the area, each one free standing and almost like a house. It was probably the highest priced of all the units I looked at.