Future Care-Cherrywood Healthcare and Rehblttn Ctr

My mother was transferred from Northwest Hospital to Future Care Cherrywood on Monday, 9÷28÷15. The shiny brochure and the «sales» person who spoke with us during my mom’s hospital stay left the impression that this would be a modern, attractive facility. Thinking back, I remember this lady admitting she had never been to this facility. Why hadn’t the Regional Care Director for Future Care not visited one of their locations? I quickly found out why…
When I visited Future Care Cherrywoof that evening around 8:30 pm, the reality could not have been farther from the sales pitch. Walking into the small lobby area, I detected an unpleasant fishy smell. The front area had a shiny new-​looking sign and some nice decorations, but beyond that point I could see that this place has not been renovated since the 80’s. Everything was old, worn-​out, and dirty. Chipped paint, dirt in every corner, unidentifiable deposits of what I hoped was food on the hallway floor. In my mom’s room, the floor was very dirty, and the filter of the air conditioning unit was caked with dirt & dust. 30-​year old furniture, no hangers in the wardrobe, on and on. My mom told me that fish was served for dinner – perhaps an explanation for the fishy smell.
My mom was on oxygen at Northwest Hospital – a tube that hooked into a unit in the wall. Here, they roll a large suitcase-​sized contraption up to the bed to provide the concentrated humidified O2. It made a loud bubbling noise that competed with the filthy, noisy air conditioning unit.
I picked up the TV remote to move it and it was sticky & had bits of food on it! **Two days later, the remote was still dirty.
Did I mention the suspicious deposits of some sort of food in the hallway in at least 3 places? The floor was old gray linoleum flecked with brown & black specks designed to hide dirt. Unfortunately, there was too much dirt to hide.
That night, my mom was awakened by the sound of a naked man who had wandered into her room & was mumbling gibberish. She pressed the call bell, the responding staff member said something like «Hey you, naked again Mr. ??» Apparently this is a regular occurrence causing no concern.
The night of 9÷29÷15, there were heavy rains in the area. My mom woke up sometime during the night, opened the door to the toilet room, and was greeted by a flooded floor and a steady drip of water coming through a completely soaked ceiling tile. She had noted previously that the ceiling tile was stained by an earlier leak. The nurse led her to the hallway shower room to use that toilet. The next morning, the water was mopped up & the ceiling tile was replaced. I wonder what sort of mold was up there after repeated leaks.
Please understand that I didn’t walk in with a magnifying glass on the hunt for specks of dirt. My observations were only things I noticed from brief glances. Also, my mom is easy to please and has never complained about the environment in hospitals where she has stayed in the past.
The staff was friendly, but the nurse was obviously over-​worked & exhausted looking. I can’t imagine having to work in those conditions.
An even more egregious fault of this facility is that they had none of my mom’s medications on the evening she arrived, even though they had several hours notice of her arrival. My mom is on many medications for various life-​threatening conditions. She was supposed to get two antibiotic doses each day, but they did not provide this until the next night – two missed doses of antibiotic?! She was also not given medications she needs for anxiety & insomnia and has gotten very little sleep as a result.
I’m yanking my mother out of there as soon as I can find another place and reporting this place to the ombudsman and to Medicare. Is it honestly too much to ask for a clean, slightly modern facility that can provide patients with the correct medications in a timely manner? Northwest Hospital was like a four-​star hotel in comparison. I asked her nurse to provide a list of what medications my mom was given up to that point. I was told that I would have to speak to the doctor about this because they did not have access to computers so could not print anything. The best she could do was look at her paper list of my mom’s meds & compare it against the list I had of my mom’s medications. I was not, however, given the requested information of what medications she had actually been given each day.