Whitehall of Deerfield

Dr. Lana

Great Rehabilitation place. Acupuncture can be done at this place by your request for residents Free valet parking and comfortable stay

D. Greenberg

My parent was a resident on the long term care service. When our parent was admitted, one of the professional staff recommended that we hire private duty caregivers if we wanted our family member to get adequate care. This was spot-on advice as residents with dementia are at the mercy of the staff. But even with 24 hour private duty care, we could not totally protect our parent from being dropped in the shower twice, getting incorrect medication, falling out of bed multiple times, clothes and belongings stolen and numerous other problems. The RNs and LPNs spend most of their time at the computer leaving the CNAs to work unsupervised. A few are wonderful. Many are uncaring and cause more harm than good. We regularly observed residents being 'fed' in the sunroom by the CNAs, each CNA will 'feed' 4 residents at a time. Meals are completed and cleaned up within 20 minutes. Many of these residents only get a few bites to eat. When the RN brings medications, he will leave it with the private duty person to administer and never check to see if it was administered. The few RNs that go by the book (they are required to administer the medications), will try and administer the meds and if the resident doesn't take it immediately, it is considered 'refused.' Medical records often have missing documentation (our DNR form was not in the chart for some time) and medications that an RN said were ordered were found not to be ordered when we asked why the medication had not arrived on the floor. Communication from one nursing shift to the next shift was ineffective. Whitehall states that they will check in on residents every two hours. This rarely happened during the day and less so at night as reported by many of our private duty caregivers. The CNAs grow to expect your private duty people to do all of the personal care. Our private caregivers were invaluable for going out in the hallway to find a CNA to help with needed care and thereby avoid a long wait time. More important, without a private caregiver or family member who can visit daily, there is next to no personal connection to others for the resident . The private caregivers must walk a thin line of staying 'on the good side' of the staff yet reporting to the family all of the problems they see. The activity department has some very caring people that do make connections. The only problem with the activity program is that the activities are often not suited to residents with dementia and the activity staff does not always approach residents with attention to their specific medical conditions. It is interesting that when the nursing home is expecting a state health inspection, things change drastically. Sleepy clients parked in the halls are nowhere to be seen (usually they can be left sitting in the hall for most of the day), the staff kitchen is cleaned up and old dinner trays disappear from the counters. The dirty laundry is picked up off the floor in front of the laundry cart. And we reviewed the inspection reports at medicare.gov and can say from experience that the online reports miss the majority of the serious problems at this facility. Discussing the problems with administrators and the nursing director is ineffective. They are aware of the problems but are unable to change the culture of the nursing staff. End of life issues are handled without compassion and coldly by the floor staff. Staffing issues were a problem before the pandemic and now things are exponentially worse. Before the pandemic, plenty of people were hired because they needed a pay check; not because they had a desire to be around nursing home residents. Salaries are so low that one cannot expect to see qualified employees working here. The problems are most acute on the long term care service, where management seems to have little interest in quality of care. There are a few very caring CNAs and just a few RNs we encountered who are excellent professionals. They only serve to remind us how lacking others are.

Link Bradford

The nurses at Whitehall knew what they had to do to get me in to visit my father on his last day when all the covid restrictions were at their peak. We did it safely and we communicated and got the closure that we could have only hoped for. I will never forget that effort.

Marcy Primack

Caring staff and clean environment.