Pleasanton South Nursing and Rehab

Chuck

Mom has been at Pleasanton South Nursing and Rehab several times, but this last stint was three months. It was terrible. The food was terrible. They didn't take any special care in treating their residents. I'm speaking on the corporation. They didn't have enough staff, so they were always short-staffed. I confronted them about that. I said, "How come you don't have enough staff and my mother has to wait and poo and pee for 20 minutes minimum" and then if it's dinnertime, forget it, you're not going to get somebody in there to take you to the bathroom until they're finished with dinner and they got all the patrons put back in their bed. Another thing is that my mother had a bed for people who were heavy, and it was a little bit longer than all the other ones, so their bright idea was they were going to take the bed and turn it sideways against the wall instead of setting it up like a normal person. The other bed next to her was set up correctly, but for some reason, they put my mom in that position, which I didn't like at all. It was unsafe because none of them knew how to pull the bed away from the wall when they would raise her head up for lunch, and they had this receptacle on the wall that would have four plugs, and they would hit it. One day, they knocked it off the wall, and it was hanging in her room when I got there. I don't know how long it took them, but after a while, they finally fixed it. The poor staff worked hard to take care of my mother with what they had. I talked to the director of nurses, and I told her that I'm sick and tired of people telling me, "We're understaffed." I said, "It is unacceptable, and it is not my problem, so you need to rectify that right now." If people aren't going to get care, I said, "You need to put more nursing people in there." They need to be shut down. There was mold in the units there. The TV didn't work half the time, and maintenance failed to make it cool enough in there for the people to enjoy themselves. They never had enough ice during the day for water refills. There was somebody in the bed next to her, which cut the room off even more. There was very, very little space for what Medicare was paying for. They were just cleaning up on my mother's insurance and not giving her the care that she deserved. They had activities, and they had an activity director who would have bingo for them. They would have people who would come and sing. Kids from the school would come in and sing carols, and that's good, but if you don't take care of everything else, that really seems to be trivial and not even worth it. One day, while I was at work, I got a call from one of my caregivers that the nursing home wanted to talk to me. The social worker goes, "You need to make a decision because your mom's 30 days are up, and you need to either pick her up or arrange transportation for her home." I said, "How are her 30 days up? Y'all told me, and my schedule said that she's going to be released on the 28th." The social worker said, "No, it was always the 8th." I said, "That's funny, and you're telling me that we need to vacate, but you didn't give that to me in writing yet, did you? I see that you've fallen very short already. We're not moving until I get a formal written letter that states we need to vacate." Number two, I'm not ready because we had settled on the 28th, and the only way she's leaving this facility is when hospice has all the equipment that she needs over at the other place, and then, we will go ahead, and we will vacate the premises. The staff worked hard and would have been much better had they had more help.