Brighter Living Assisted Living

Erika Zee

I visited this place to do some volunteer work a couple weeks ago. And I want to start by saying that this place needs to hire BILINGUAL staff because this place has patients from all types of different backgrounds. I was disgusted with what myself and other colleagues witness from one of the workers who name is Mary, because she was too comfortable being unprofessional in front of us and belittling one of the patients by saying, “stop speaking that rubbish.” When referring to the patient speaking his native language which was Spanish. This was not her first time stating something ignorant, when we first arrive me and my colleagues, there were a lot of us coming from different backgrounds so again we had bilingual personnel in our group. My colleagues were having a conversation between themselves and was in their native tongue. All I heard was Mary say, “we don’t speak that around here! Only English.” So I looked at her and told her, why don’t you learn a second language instead! Because nobody is ever going to tell us we can’t speak our first language!” So clearly her and some of the other staff I didn’t get their names but they work in the second floor. Had made a comment about the bilingual patient and how he’s speaking that rubbish. It’s just so disgusting how these are so called caregivers. I am not even a Caregiver and I know better than to talk down to these patients especially when clearly early dementia is occurring and patients tend to start forgetting their second language and refer back to their primary language. I hope my review reaches this patients family so they can remove him and place him somewhere more welcoming! I felt very scared for what these patients deal with behind closed doors. I highly recommend Mary to get supervised and retrained, if she’s going to continue working with these patients.