Heartland Health Care Center-Ann Arbor

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my brother is here now. i do not see any improvement in his health. i am not sure they know how to help him. the food is bad, when answering the call light it takes anywhere from 5-20 minutes and that is during dinner, a person could choke to death in that time. he does say the therapist are ok, when he has the energy to meet with them. they allow care givers to wear too much cologne.

I toured three skilled nursing facilities before selecting Heartland for a loved one. I liked its interior—it was comfortable and homey (one of the places in town I toured was a little depressing, with a smell/ very institutional. The other was gorgeous inside, sort of 4-star restaurant. Heartland is more like Bob Evans in many of its interior spaces.)

The room is adequate but small. There’s space for a nice bed and an ok sitting chair and a small nightstand, but there’s absolutely no more space: you can’t rotate the chair so the person in it can see the person in the bed. Visitors basically need to stand there. It seems like the rooms were initially planned as single rooms and then made into doubles with privacy curtains: there’s a single light switch to operate the lights over the whole room, and only one person gets a window (the other gets the clock). There is another light over the bed, but someone sitting in bed can’t turn it on, and someone whose balance isn’t great (many of their clients?) can’t really get to it.

The therapy my loved one got there was pretty good. All therapists seemed well-trained, the therapy room was nice and modern, etc. The therapy was the best part of the nursing home.

They need a lot more nurses/nursing aides. I was very disappointed in the wait times for things. When my loved one would push his button for help, he’d wait ~20 min average for help. This was usually ok—he was hoping someone would come help him change his clothes for bed, and waiting a bit to do so wasn’t a big deal—but no one came to “triage,” so I always worried that some time he’d be pulling the cord from the floor or something and there for a longer time. The lack of staff results in these long wait times and also in insanity at bottleneck times: we’d come at 11am and my loved one wasn’t always dressed yet, and when we asked the aide about this she pointed out that she’s responsible for 11 people and it takes ~30min/person. I wish they had more helpers or overlapping shifts at bottleneck times or something. Specific people we interacted with seemed good.

I thought the food seemed only okay (lots of gravy over very soft meat, sometimes served cool), but my loved one liked the food a lot anyway. Their dishwasher broke his second day there, so the food was served on styrafoam and with plastic utensils (this was still true at his discharge on day 11).

I think my biggest frustration was with the administration/communication. We were told different things by different people repeatedly (which day he’d be discharged, whether or not something had been faxed to insurance, which medication they’d changed him to, various important and unimportant things). At our discharge meeting, no one from nursing came and the social worker basically said “we’d need to ask someone from nursing about that” for everything we asked. When we came on the day of discharge, his nurse and therapists hadn’t been told he was leaving that day.