Valley Comfort

Kristi Hayden

This is a review for the assisted living portion of valley comfort. The facility is very clean and nice and Nick promises the world on the tour. We were very upfront with the fact that my mom’s dementia kept her from remembering to take pills, showers, cook, or clean her clothes and that she has sundowners. She is completely mobile but needs lots of cuing to do daily living. Nick assured us they were very skilled at getting dementia patients showered, given meds, etc. and in the brochure it says this is done daily. After paying $1500 for a “fee” on top of the monthly rent and decorating her room up, she moved in. A few days later I noticed her hair was getting greasy. And this was the beginning of valley comfort not doing what they promised to do and what we paid for. I had to constantly ask why my mom wasn’t being showered and then I found out they weren’t giving her pills. They said they focused on the “important” ones. You could see on their med record when I took her to dr visits how little they were actually giving. They never communicated any showering or med issues to me, but when I would complain after discovering something, they would say my mom was combative, even though I had never seen combative behavior from her at home. I asked another resident that hung out with my mom if my mom was combative and was told no, but that the workers were unnecessarily rough with her when she was confused. Never was there a plan for how to rectify these problems from the owners. She just continued to be dirty and hardly any meds for a month. I thought, as nick promised, that they were skilled with dementia patients? Then a different resident pulled me aside and said she had witnessed abusive behavior from a worker towards my mom and was very upset about it and said she reported it. Did I get a call? No. So I called and nick said he would investigate and call me back. He did not but I called him the next day and again he made some excuse, saying that what the other resident had seen was not what really happened, that she was mistaken. The final straw for me was two days later when my mom had a medical emergency and valley comfort sent her to the ER by ambulance and the nurse from the ER called me and said the EMTS had seen red flags at the facility, not the least of which was the valley comfort workers knew little about my mom or her meds and told them she self managed her meds, which is absolutely untrue. The nurse said she wanted me to know because she would want to know if it was her mother. I immediately put in my 30 day notice and called nick. He said the EMTS were lying. What reason would they have to do that? The pattern with nick was deny, deny, deny that the facility had any culpability in these things. It’s statistically impossible that 3 different sources reporting issues were all wrong and that the facility was never at fault. There seems to be a very large disconnect between what is going on with the workers and what the management is aware of. I CAN say that my mom’s room was always clean and her clothes were always clean. The other residents were also wonderful with my mom, befriending her and including her. Those were the only positives. So all in all it was an extremely expensive and frustrating experience (our first trial of outside care for my mom) and I agree with some of the other reviews I’ve seen on this place. I wish I had never set foot in the place or believed their promises. I’m sure nick will have some comment to this review about why it’s so wrong and they were not at fault (as I’ve seen him do on other poor reviews) but these are the facts I witnessed. As soon as I gave notice and explained why, suddenly she started getting showered and meds given and more phone calls than I had ever received before. Were they afraid I was going to report them? No idea. Bottom line, if your loved one does not have dementia this assisted living might work for them, but if they have dementia, I would steer clear of this place.