AHAVA HEALTHCARE OF ALABASTER

My Dad has been here for a week and everyone has been superb! Even my Dad who never has anything good to say when he has to come to skilled nursing rehab has been very pleased with his stay here. The nurses are wonderful, the facility is very clean, many great updates have been done and they're doing more from inside to outside. The recent change in management have really turned things around for the positive! So glad that such a wonderful place is nearby where I live so I can take my Mom to visit my Dad everyday!

My concerns lie with the administration. While doing a story on AHAVA of Alabaster for my Master's work, I have attempted since September of 2019 to reach someone for comment. All of those attempts have been unsuccessful. Last Thursday I learned that it's AHAVA's policy not to give comments to media by someone who refused to identify herself and was quite curt with me. I was not asking for her name to publish a statement, I was asking because administration let me wait for 20 minutes before anyone came out to speak with me, so at the very least I could identify who I spoke with if anyone wondered where I got my information from. I was trying my best to communicate as much to her as well as the administration before I even came to AHAVA, but she did not want to hear anything I had to say and turned away from me before I was finished speaking. I later spoke with a woman named Sarah from corporate who reiterated the policy to me while I was filming, and she afforded more professionalism to me, though it seems she wasn't aware I was there until after that took place. I also learned that to some degree the administration does not listen to their own voicemails, since some higher up asked the receptionist what my voicemail said. Regardless of your feelings towards journalism/media in general, everyone deserves to be treated with some degree of respect.

This place is by far the most unorganized , ran by the worst management. These residents have so much to say and no one hears them, the HR (Linda)is cruel and judgmental. Someone needs to hear the residents

My grandmother was in this facility and enjoyed every minute of it. Im a current employee and love all my staff and residents.

Anyone who is giving this place 5 stars is either an employee or they aren't paying attention to their loved one who lives here. And to clarify, the rehab unit is a completely different world from the long term care units here. They remodeled the rehab floor to look all nice and neat so that the short term care family members would trust the place. No other part of this facility looks like the rehab/short-term care floor nor are the other employees anything like them. I have worked here as a CNA and it is the worst. They came under new management but the same people work here. The same people who made this place nearly get shutdown, and honestly I hope it does. And I'm not some disgruntled ex-employee either. I quit myself, because I couldn't stand the way these people were being treated. I worked as a cna and in other departments and I have seen enough to know this place isn't right. There are people who beg to get out of their beds all day and are just kept in them, left unchanged and have rashes all over their bottoms.. The food is terrible, the cna's talk to them like they're children.. when I was being trained, I had to follow a cna and I went to hand out food as a training duty and one woman was in tears when she saw her meal, then she told me she felt like she was in a madhouse and that her family didn't care about her and that she didn't want her meal, she just wanted to die. I stayed in her room with her and tried to make her feel better and I got in trouble for it. These people are room numbers to the facility, not actual people. I was made to leave this woman in tears when this was her home. She was paying for this service and she deserved comfort. they all do, but never get it. I saw a woman with a terrible sore on her bottom from being left in her bed in a dirty diaper for hours on end, day after day, and I saw CNA'S wipe her sore bottom roughly because they were in a hurry. One cna told me a resident had cdiff and when she told the nurses, they did nothing for the resident. No one liked her because she was always in pain and always complaining and kind of whining, which I would have too if I were in this place. Her call light would go off for half an hour and no one would come to her room. They called her 'crybaby'. That resident died 2 weeks later from sepsis. The call lights stay on for several minutes without anyone answering them. I've seen them stay on for over an hour. They never have clean linens, and most of the CNA's wipe the residents with dry washcloths when they change them, and roughly, just making their inevitable bedsores and rashes worse. And these are rough, constantly bleached washcloths, as the facility rarely buys new linens. And if you bring your resident a nice clothing article or blanket or some nice shoes or socks, you wasted your money. Everything gets lost in the laundry and they never see it again. The same goes for bedclothes. The laundry crew often just throws it away anyway, because they hate washing personals. At one point, I went to walk in through the back door and a line of residents were there in the hallway, waiting to be let out to smoke, and one cna told me, right in front of the residents, that they had been annoying and the facility was talking about taking their smoke breaks away. Please don't send your loved one here. I have seen people who once could walk end up in wheelchairs here because they arent being let out of bed and their muscles are wilting away. I have seen terrible things. these people are dirty and uncared for and it reminds me of Willowbrook Asylum from the mid 1900's. That's how bad this place is. I wouldn't send my dog here, much less feed my dog the food these people have to eat 3 times a day. I got offered a free lunch once and I wouldn't take it. It's that bad. Get your loved one out. Don't listen to these liars saying they're fine. They aren't. These people are monsters. If you really care, don't try and detach to feel better about yourself. you should feel terrible. Take them somewhere else. this is the kind of place you hear about on the news.