Current Situation

The current situation at Saints Joachim and Anne Nursing and Rehabilitation Center is very gleam. Many staff members are poorly trained or not trained at all.

Untrained, unlicensed staff doing critical work.

They have certified nursing assistants that are working their very first day on the job changing a patient on a ventilator without any respiratory training at all. In a professional environment a respiratory therapist or a nurse who is trained in respiratory care must be present. Patients including myself choke and frequently vomit while being turned in bed without professional respiratory supervision. This situation is very unsafe with even veteran certified nursing assistants because they are only trained to clean patients, not to provide any respiratory care.

Medical response is very slow for patients in distress.

I have choked repeatedly for as much as two hours with my tracheostomy full of mucosal secretions waiting for a respiratory therapist to come. They are short staffed and some respiratory therapists are just plain lazy. There are some that sit at the nursing station surfing the internet on their cellphones and just don’t respond. I choke often and my friends have called an ambulance for me at least twenty times after I contacted them on the internet. Since I’m paralyzed and can’t speak. I can only communicate through the use of a special computer that tracks my eyes. Most patients on the ventilator floor choke all night without anyone coming and helping them. My roommate is one of them, and if if I didn’t have a computer, people who care and a strong social media presence I would be also choking continually all day. Please remember they do have some very hard working respiratory therapists here also who are very professional. They just have a large number of unprofessional people here also.

Poor cleaning of patients.

There have been many times that I have been cleaned very poorly. The CNA barely washed me at all. She didn’t even use water. Just a wet towel with liquid soap on it. The soap was left on my skin without even being washed off. They put soap on the towel while washing my eyes. Any kindergarten kid knows you don’t put soap in someone’s eyes. They drip water into my ears causing infections. My genital area, anus and hips were barely cleaned leaving residue and itching in my anus and genital area. Imagine yourself going to the bathroom for number two and not wiping and walking around all day like that. Now imagine you also wet your pants, have soap all over you that you didn’t wash off during showering, are drenched in sweat from a very hot day and are choking on water throughout the day. That is the way I live here. Especially before I started posting my life on Facebook, people were getting involved, complaints were filed,, ambulances and police were called.

Poor attention given to patients.

Many times my bed had bulges that I had to sleep on, my computer was poorly aligned so I couldn’t communicate, my bed improperly configured to cause distress and discomfort, put in a position in the bed that I couldn’t breathe well and caused pain and prolonged suffering. My hands placed in such a way to cause pain and discomfort. My diaper squeezing my scrotum and penis, or put on crooked to be considerably more on one side causing a wedgie.  The person responsible for fixing this just turning around and running out and not coming back even after repeated calls by my friends when I alerted them on Facebook, and sometimes I couldn’t alert them, because my computer was so misaligned that I couldn’t use it. My friend got me a call bell that I can use with my foot. Before that I was completely helpless. Sometimes waiting for hours before someone came into my room to alert them by making a clicking sound with my mouth since my hands are paralyzed and I can’t speak. Many times this person of coming in after several hours of nobody coming and me being in discomfort and now choking very hard would just turn around and leave completely ignoring me. Frequently I was very scared that I would pass out completely and lose consciousness from the tracheostomy being clogged and the alarm not persistently sounding due to the nursing home setting it at the minimum state levels to save money on respiratory care. Since if it went off frequently it would require more respiratory therapists. This is torture. That is how I lived for many months and patients still live like this at Saints Joachim and Anne Nursing and Rehabilitation Center.

Complaints unaddressed.

After complaining to social workers and upper management. Nothing was done. I barely get any response from anyone when I email them. (The response percentage has improved lately with the new director of social work.) My social worker does respond a good percentage of the time but nothing is ever fixed. Everything just remains the same. It is all just words. Nobody here plans to fix anything because that means spending money and lowering profits.

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