Royal Care Skilled Nursing Center

This place is given five stars out of five by the government watchdogs and for the most part I agree. The staff is very good and they treat the patients well. There was usually someone immediately available at the nurse’s station to talk to me or to respond to a request. Sometimes they do get too busy or cause themselves problems like scheduling a staff meeting and not leaving enough employees on the floor to cover for all the people in the meeting. When they are very busy, the call lights go unanswered for quite some time, often 30 minutes or more, and the buzzers that accompany the call lights are very loud and audible in the rooms, making sleep impossible. When my mother was here, a stomach flu made its rounds in the city and some residents in the nursing center became sick too. The staff instituted safety measures: required gloves, masks and gowns to try to prevent the spread of the illness. When there is an illness like this though, the patients are in isolation mode and cannot go to the gym for therapy, so my mother was not able to recover as well as we had expected within the time allotted by insurance. This facility smells good, no urine smell. The food is OK. The patient furniture, such as night stands, is on the worn side. The facility itself is remodeled at the entrance to look modern and inviting but the rooms are standard and the windows old fashioned and uninsulated. There are fans for air circulation. I was not able to determine if the place has air conditioning. There is a special room beautifully upgraded, for those needing to practice living at home, but I never saw anyone using it. When I would go to the nurse’s station to check on my mom’s progress, I was happy to find doctor notes, nurse’s notes, medicine notes, and they even had physical therapy notes available in the chart, which was great because I did not find this to be the case at other places.

This place is actually very good. There was usually a nurse available immediately when I would approach the station and they were always able to update me correctly about my mother’s condition. I received calls at home letting me know how she was doing. When she was admitted they had a care conference and addressed all of my concerns. The information about her food allergies did not make it to the weekend cooks so I had to have her food changed a couple of times but other than that there were no mix ups. They have snacks available at night in case a resident gets hungry. The facility is clean and smells good. The nurses feed the residents who cannot feed themselves, they turn them to different sides, they keep foam pads around the beds of people who might fall. The facility is close to the sidewalk so they have to be careful at night to close the curtains so passersby aren’t able to see in. There is very little parking.