Magnolias of Lancaster

My dad is at Magnolias of Lancaster. It's going well. The place is very good for dementia. The staff seems to be good. I'm there for every dinner and their food is OK. The dining area is very clean and very nice. I'm not there during the day, but I have seen my dad doing some painting and some crafts. The place is very open so he can wheel himself around the whole area with no problem. He is not confined to a room or to one single space. The staff is very good too. I like them.

Magnolias of Lancaster seems to be well run. Part of the problem is that there's just a revolving door where my mother is, and nobody seems to know her. They're understaffed and the people don't stay very long. The location is good for me, and I think very highly of the director there. The price is a little lower than we expected.

Magnolias is a top notch personal care facility. Because my father had problematic, obsessive behaviors, I have had the chance to observe a lot of personal care situations. The staff at Magnolias was the absolute best! I have never seen a resident spoken to in a cross or exasperated manner (something that is all too common with dementia patients), staff was very attentive to residents--if they were messy in any way, the staff noticed and remedied it. I was so surprised when they offered to trim my father's overgrown fingernails within 20 minutes of his arrival. His beard was always neatly trimmed, his room was clean, and he was well-groomed. Because my father likes coffee so much, the staff always had some ready for him. I had to write a personal story for my father before he entered, and every staff member I met told me they had read his story and mentioned some detail of it. This made me feel secure that they would "understand" his dementia personality and indeed I observed staff members relating to him on his terms at all time. My father had to leave Magolias because his personal journey with dementia created an obsessive desire to escape coupled with an equally strong fear of escaping. In short, Magnolias simply had too many doors and windows for him and I had to find him a small, restrictive environment that resembled a hospital setting in order for him to calm some of his anxiety. He will never be "happy", but he is less anxious now. But the difference in staff attention where he now makes me so sad that he couldn't stay at Magnolias. We are going to hire a personal aide for him at the new place just to make sure his needs are met and it does frustrate me that the staff at Magnolias met his needs (and made it look fun and easy!) but at most other personal care homes like the one he is at now, that is not the case at all. I would highly recommend checking out Magnolias to see if it would be a good fit for your loved one who is dealing with dementia--an incredibly difficult disease. I would like to add that the Magnolia staff has training in working with dementia patients. And even though every place I dealt with said that about their caretakers, at Magnolias I believed they really did because every interaction with residents was what I could say was the "right" way to treat a person with dementia.

The lady at Magnolias of Lancaster who worked with me was very nice, and I liked her a lot. The facility itself, not so much. It was OK, decent, and clean. Since it’s an Alzheimer’s facility, it wasn’t as big, but it had a fairly decent-sized dining area and had all the precautions in place for Alzheimer's. The rooms were a nice size and clean. The staff wasn’t too friendly and can improve on their interactions with people. I would recommend it. Magnolias was pricier, costing close to $6,000.