The patient care team does not answer the phone, return calls, or pass messages along to patients in their care. It took 4+ days to get connected by phone to my elderly relative who was desperately waiting to here from family. On one of the days I tried to reach my relatives it took MORE THAN TWENTY phone calls to reach him. My 20+ calls, which were between 10am and 2pm were routed to various lines that were connected to:
The wrong room;
A nursing station that never picked up;
A patient care line where I was instructed to leave messages that were not returned;
And a the office of a random property management company that was closed for the weekend.
Floor staff are kind, but whoever is in charge of running this place needs to be put in a diaper and left in bed for a week or so without any way to contact the outside world.
Review from Guidestar
Our family's experience during the summer of 2012 was mixed. We experienced care givers whose work and compassion deserve praise, and these people gifted us with their skill and care. On the other hand, there were basic and serious lapses in care, communication and billing that haunt us. These lapses seem to be systemic, and we question whether the organization is adequately set up to provide some of the services it advertises. We're sharing our experience in the hope that transparency will benefit other families and the organization itself.
Our family's situation: My father entered Jewish Home Lifecare from a local hospital on June 27, 2012 with the goal of rehabilitation after he fell due to Parkinson's Disease. Instead, his health deteriorated. We got him into hospice care on Aug. 10th at Beth Israel Hospital and he died four days later. Hospice care by Beth Israel and MJHS Hospice was amazing and we recommend that.
The following are the Jewish Home's own standards that it publishes on its website, contrasted with our experience:
* Their promise: With the patient's approval, the team can meet family members to coordinate care and plan transition back home."
* Our experience: communication was haphazard and incomplete and added enormously to our family's stress as we scrambled to figure out how to get the care my father needed. We regularly got half answers and experienced missed appointments, which would have been alright if those were just glitches on the way to full answers and information. But they weren't. A specific consequence: we experienced a delay in getting our father into hospice care, and wish it had been done a week earlier; the pain and distress he experienced during that time of limbo cannot be undone. In addition, even after putting all our issues in writing and trying to work the chain of command/responsibility, some crucial issues remained unaddressed ( See below).
* Their promise: "Medicare, Medicaid, and Private Pay options are available. Our financial administrators will work with you to identify, devise, and implement the right plan for you."
* Our experience: The financial administrators were unable to accurately fill out basic insurance information. After numerous requests verbally and in writing, and even after our father's death, this remains undone. The lapses are not just on skilled issues, but basic clerical ones, like putting a form in the mail (we were assured it was done and two weeks after that assurance got an email that reads verbatim "If you would like I will sent [sic] you the original form in the mail." At over $500 a day for room and board, the financial costs are a significant stress factor for any family, and other families should know that the Jewish Home bills patients in advance but may not have the capacity to follow through on basic insurance claims needed by families to sustain that care.
* Adequate care. Their promise: "Jewish Home Lifecare's Short Stay Rehabilitation Centers' approach to rehabilitation focuses on the individual with a custom care plan that begins right at admission."
* Our experience: a lot of the therapy care was excellent and the nursing staff was compassionate and skilled - but stretched too thin. We supplemented their care with individual aides especially for the overnight shift (yes, very expensive and not possible for all families, including for us over a sustained period). Two issues that we will never know the answer to occurred once his health declined irrevocably, and he stopped eating completely and his physical and emotional distress markedly increased: 1) did it make sense to continue to deliver medication orally (again, he wasn't eating, we don't know if the medicine was adequately swallowed) as opposed to via a patch or under the tongue, options that other providers told us was advisable 2) what difference would he have experienced if he had access to the facility's inhouse palliative expert. We didn't know that this person existed until told by an outside source. When we did finally consult with him, he suggested moving our father to Beth Israel Hospital's hospice care unit. We did that same day. It was the best decision we made.
We hope this review is helpful to other families and to Jewish Home Lifecare itself. There is nothing in our experience that wasn't first expressed directly to the home. Repeatedly.
In addition to our 6 week experience, viewers may find this info helpful as well:
* Wall St. Journal investigative reporter Lucette Lagnado's memoir of her father, in which "The Jewish Home and Hospital is seen as a cruel uncaring facility" http://bit.ly/PHG4cM
* The state of NY's nursing home rankings, http://nursinghomes.nyhealth.gov/nursing_homes/quality/449
Review from Guidestar