Sunrise Assisted Living At Alta Loma

This could be the most important review I will ever write and I would like to speak to you about elder care and how Sunrise let me down in a big way. After my father passed away after being diagnosed with cancer things became clear that he and my mother were working as a team and that she just did not have memory problems she was close to full blown dementia. I am a only child so my mothers care was a decision I had to make on my own and after trying to keep mom at home which I did for seven months it was very clear that she needed to be placed and when driving to work in the mornings I had driven past Sunrise at Alta Loma several times and I had loved the look of the house so I thought I would give them a call. Now you need to understand that I had never had to deal with anything like this before and I was under the impression that because their charge was high that they were paying their people really well and that meant that their standard of care would match the beauty of the house and that my mother would be taken care of really well but that was not the case here and the old saying «all that glitters is not gold» really applies here with a vengeance. Things started happening and I was informed of none of it and only discovered that things were going really wrong when my mother developed pressure sores on her bottom because she was not going to bed at night and nobody was checking on this. I also noticed that my mother was not clean and that she hadn’t had a bath in weeks, she was dressed and her clothes were clean but she was not bathing, I could smell how dirty her hair was. Now because your parent has dementia the place where your parent is can say that they asked her and she said no and you have no recourse because your parent is not going to remember much of this so you just have to go with it. Then my mother was robbed by one of the workers and when I brought this up with the director she said it was a problem but she could do nothing and because once again your parent cannot remember someone in her purse you once again have no recourse. You are pretty much helpless here and your only recourse is to find a better place. There was a problem with moms medication and she had been prescribed 4 ibuprofen for pain and this somehow got mixed up to be 4 ibuprofen every 4 hours around the clock and they did it and never questioned it at all and any moron knows that you should never take more than 4 to 8 of those pills in a day and that it’s dangerous to take large amounts of that medication as it causes liver damage and can destroy your stomach and it was a couple of days when I caught it because I was taking mom home with me for the weekend and they were preparing medication to go home with me and I saw what they did. When I questioned about medication and why you would do this they just said that it’s what the doctor prescribed and so on and nobody questioned and nobody called me and nobody made a phone call to the doctors office to confirm and the lack of care in this matter in my opinion was close to attempted murder and could be headed up under complete incompetence!!! and there were lots of other little things that told the story of what was going on here but I didn’t see it until later, the food served was the cheapest cuts of meat, always a chicken leg or thigh but never the breast which means that they are watching really hard how much they spend on food. I was paying between $ 4200 and $ 4500 a month which translates out to about $ 900 a week for care and you would think that they could put something better on the plate besides a cheap chicken thigh but that tells you where the money is going and it’s not toward the people who are living there and it’s not toward the people who work there either it’s a corporation and they are raking in the cash and someone’s getting really fat but the care you are paying for is minimal at the most. I am lucky in one respect and that is my mother kept her rings she said someone tried to get them off of her but she would not let them and she told me she had to say no several times so the people who work at this place are not paid much more that of minimum wage and they are literally feeding off the brain damaged patients who are living there and because they know that getting caught is next to impossible there is not much of a recourse. there’s lots more to say but I am almost out of space so this is what I would do now with what I know. Don’t think with your heart but use your brain nobody wants to put a parent in a home, do your research and if a place smells like pee get out of there and find really good nanny cameras that record for at least 24 hours but a week would be better and have it hooked into your phone so you can watch what’s going on and do not get sucked in by how pretty the place is because without the care it’s nothing but a dirty hovel. Good luck and I wish you well.

Our experience continues to be good. The caregivers are caring and the director deals with problems asap. The food still needs work but they try new things. The casino trips and bingo is wonderful. My in laws look ahead to see what activities are coming up and it keeps them going.

Our mother moved in this week. It would be an understatement to say she is difficult. The admissions staff couldn’t be more accommodating, kind and understanding. My only negative remark would be the enormous amount of paperwork involved is onerous. We believe that our Mom is in the best place available.