Brittany Kauffman

Review of Willow Brook Care Center, Denv...

My grandma was here for a couple of months and it ...

My grandma was here for a couple of months and it was disappointing, to put it nicely. The facility itself is beautiful and for the most part, clean. The actual caregiving staff is very kind and friendly, but lack training. The director actually said the training consists of watching powerpoints in a room. This place also only employs the very minimal amount of nursing staff legally required. There is not a nurse there 24/7 which means health concerns can only be addressed during business hours. The QMAPS give medication to the residents but are unable to make any sort of appropriate judgements as to whether or not a patient should be medicated (i.e. waking up a resident to give them medications to subdue them when they are already passed out). One of the main nurses is very rude and is very short with you if you have questions or requests. My Grandma fell an absurd amount of times in this facility and we were told that there really wasn t anything they could do about it. That s unacceptable. When we asked how they make sure residents are safe when they are alone in their room we were told they are checked on every two hours. These are elderly residents and most of them with dementia and other functioning disabilities and the best you can do is check on them every two hours? That s hardly appropriate care. Don t bother setting up a meeting to discuss your concerns because you will just be talked down to and told that there isn t anything else they can do. How about adequate training for your poorly trained caregivers? You don t learn how to take care of anyone through watching a powerpoint. I don t wonder for a second why the turnover rate is so high there. Placing young caregiving staff there with limited experience, training and guidance is never going to work. There is no communication among the staff which leads to frustration when nobody can tell you what is going on with your loved one or how they are doing. But the problem is not the caregiving staff. It s the management, or really lack there of. Hardly anything is actually managed there and what is managed, isn t managed well. Effective and respected management teams consist of people who are willing to listen to feedback and accept responsibility for what is wrong and actually make an effort to fix it. Fixing it isn t firing people. It s showing them what they should be doing and how to better handle these residents. But how can this be done when management doesn t even know what to do?