Easton Health and Rehabilitation and Praxis

I'm a current patient in this so called nursing center. I was sent here to finish out my therapy and am way under the age to be considered a senior citizen. This place is a senior jail/confinement center. It's dirty and not so well maintained. They let patients have their tvs louder than needed. They go through belongings when you are and aren't around. They take things they deem unsuitable and keep under lock and key. Nurses don't really care to answer call bells in a timely manner and if they do they won't get back with your request until they want to, if at all. My first encounter with the head administer was very rude an disrespectful on his part and his attitude for lack of caring trickles down to the employees. You do NOT want to have your elder members let alone yourself admitted to this place. Even some employees will admit how poor the conditions are in this place. You cannot even go outside for fresh air if you want, not of importance really but you are even told when you can have a smoke break. 3 times a day. They keep ice in a cooler and walk around with pitchers of water in which they also ration out as well as bottles of juice, if juice is wanted. I never noticed a nurse wash their hands before digging in the ice cooler. Do not let yourself or family come to this place.

My mother, was put into a nursing home in September due to a delirium resulting from a UTI. She is prone to this and has had several episodes like this in the past two years. Every time she has this issue, an infection is found and when she is put on an antibiotic, she quickly reverts to normal behavior. In the prior homes, they found the infection early, treated it, did physical therapy with her and had her rehabilitated in under two months. When she was brought in, this facility would not listen to my input regarding her health issues. They told me that the condition I was describing does not exist and that there is no such thing as dementia that “comes and goes“. If you Google “dementia” and “UTI”, you get many articles on this very condition and I have been told about it repeatedly by various medical professionals over the past two years but the people at this facility have dismissed my input about it since she was admitted to their facility. They are the first medical professionals in the past two years I have spoken to who either don’t know about this condition or who are in denial that it is a real one. Due to this situation, my mother was put into a Gerry chair in a diaper in the hallway for about a month in which she remained in a severely altered mental state. She basically behaved as if she were in later stages of Alzheimer’s. After a month, I called the facility and just asked them to have the doctor do a urinalysis on her which they did. They found the infection, put her on a strong antibiotic and within a week, her thinking and behavior returned to normal. She is now alert and lucid and toileting herself. She is also able to get around on her own. After she recovered her mental state, I assumed that they would begin physical therapy right away like the other facilities did. Unfortunately, they seemed to have no intent on doing that. After about three weeks, I called and spoke to the physical therapist asking when they would begin and he informed me that they had already attempted physical therapy on her upon her admittance and it did not work and that she had already “plateau-d” . I begged him to at least try and he said he would. Two or three weeks went by again, nothing happened and I called back and spoke to the social worker there, who informed me that they could be accused of committing fraud by Medicare if they attempted again because they had already tried PT with her. The prior facilities that my mother had been in recognized that you cannot do PT with a patient who is in a severely altered mental state and so they both waited. They worked on eliminating the delirium first and then went into doing PT. This facility makes mistakes that cause delays in my mother’s recovery. I had to again beg them to do the PT and so they started it. My mother has done nothing but improve and recover since that time. Early this year, I did an over the phone intake with legal aid down there in order to get a P.O.A. for my mother. The day before the appointment with the attorney (March 11th) a social worker from the facility called and informed me that “corporate” (Reliant Senior Care which owns the facility) was filing for legal guardianship over my mother. There are articles about this online. There’s one from the New York Times. Some nursing homes are using guardianship laws in order to take over the finances of a patient in order to get paid--and to siphon away all that those people worked decades to acquire. How convenient. Just think if utility companies or credit card companies could file for guardianship over their customers in order to get their bills paid. My mother is just someone with a social security check. She doesn’t have other assets but that doesn’t matter. They are using it as a form of bill collection which is not the original intent of guardianship laws and courts are going along with it. I don’t care how many nursing home companies are doing this or how often or even if the law allows it--just because it has become common does not make it morally or ethically right. They said that this was because her bills were not being paid by Medicaid or by myself. They would send me outrageously large bills (in the thousands) demanding to pay them in full immediately. There were none asking me to call to make payment arrangements. Recently, I did an over-the-phone appeal with Medicaid because they had initially denied her. This was in April. She was approved and now Medicaid has paid the majority of her bill starting from her admittance. As part of the petition for guardianship, the facility attached an “Exhibit A” which is a mental competency evaluation done by EHRC’s psychiatrist. This document rates my mother as “moderate to severe” impairment on every single point. This document describes her has being a borderline vegetable. I have talked to my mother in recent months about her interactions with their psychiatrist. According to her, she has spoken directly with him a total of 10-15 minutes in the last nine months. If he is qualified to do a mental competency evaluation, he did not do a proper one with her. The court documents said that she is entitled to be evaluated by an outside doctor. I went online and Googled “most qualified to do mental competency exam” and found “neuropsychologist”. I Googled neuropsychologists in the Easton area, found a few, called and emailed them. One called me back and I set up an evaluation with her. I also helped my mother obtain an attorney by taking her to motion’s court and filing a motion for that. The judge there had a representative from Office On Aging come who filed her own motion to get my mother an attorney. That attorney, got a continuance so that my mother’s evaluation could be done. That evaluation basically states that my mother is mentally competent and does not have dementia. In her evaluation, this doctor tested my mother for almost three hours. I would assume that two doctors looking at the same patient--if that patient were truly severely impaired, it would be glaringly obvious to both doctors, so why are the evaluations so opposite? Recently, EHRC's psychiatrist's assistant, has seen my mother a couple of times and has told her that the psychiatrist was only concerned about my mother having to live alone. This was never an issue. There was never going to be, or will be, a situation where my mother would have to live alone. Personally, I feel he screwed up. I feel he was instructed by "corporate" to write an extremely negative evaluation under the assumption that my mother would do nothing to defend herself and he did so. I believe this is just what Reliant Senior Care does to elderly people on a regular basis. Many elderly people are in a vulnerable state and would not be able to fight against this. The way this looks to me is, if you want to push around an elderly person in a nursing home, label them “incompetent” so that you can take away their basic human rights and no one will take anything they say seriously; file for legal guardianship so that you can take their money--and many elderly patients--being in an extremely vulnerable state--it’s easy to steamroll over them and do this. I have had to run around trying very hard to protect her and get her out of this situation. It’s called a “rehabilitation center” because the goal is supposed to be to rehabilitate and allow that person to return home to live their life if that is possible. This is the first place she has been in that seems like their main goal is to latch onto people, take over their life and finances and maintain a lifelong stranglehold over them. I’ve made countless trips to Easton, either to deal with legal issues, to visit with her or to bring her for home visits and then return her there. She was in there for nine months for a condition that should have been resolved at most within a three month period and it just dragged on and on. Luckily, my mother was recently