Prairie Heights Memory Care

With urging and assistance from her family, my mother-in-law moved here from a senior apartment building that was not equipped for senior care or health services. For the the first time in years our family felt completely secure with her safety, health, and comfort. She was welcomed by kind staff and friendly residents. She made lasting friendships with several of the residents and staff members. Many times, she expressed deep gratitude and happiness with her living situation here.

Brookdale Eden Prairie is a very undesirable Long Term Care Facility. We stayed because it was the only place we could find that offered to take care of a pet when the resident couldn't. We struggled with pet care. Many of the staff would not sign the sheet that they fed the dog. We never knew if the dog was fed. The dog’s water bowl was often empty. We had to buy automatic feeders. I paid caregivers 7 days a week to be at Brookdale. They often took care of the dog and did many of the other services I was already paying Brookdale to perform. Many of the staff refused to take care of the dog, for religious reasons, so I don't know why Brookdale offers this service. Some staff did help with the dog, but it was not consistent. The dog was everything to my resident, or we would have moved out sooner. It was extremely difficult to get showers. My resident was often in the same clothes, for days, so she wasn’t getting dressing and peri care. The staff ruined most of my resident’s clothes. The staff destroyed 3 hearing aides. The batteries were always dead. The bed linens were not washed very often. They let OTC medication run out more than once. The staff didn’t follow direct orders from the doctor/PA. Alarms were constantly going off. We discovered hard rock, rap, and hip hop music being played for the residents. To be fair, the original Executive Director did give us several refunds for lack of services and ruined items. She did what she could to help, but the situation never got better. The turnover has been constant. There have been at least 3 Marketing Directors and 3 Health and Wellness Directors. Brookdale was on their 3rd Activities Director when we left. Now a 2nd Executive Director has been hired. There is a chronic acute staffing shortage. When we left, there were no activities going on since there was no one to do activities. One of my caregivers would read and entertain the other residents because there were limited or no activities available. There is a lack of proper Dementia training. Some of the staff are very good, others are helpful but only when directed. There is little to no communication between the staff. Everyone seems to work independently with no information being passed on to the next shift. There was at least one aide that was rude and surly. He would ignore residents requests and refuse to speak to them. He yelled at me in front of management and others for simply asking him to help take care of the dog. Management wouldn’t do anything about his behavior because they need the hours to be covered. One of my caregivers would often find him sitting in darkened rooms instead of on the floor helping residents. After meals are served, the staff leaves the dining room even though there are residents present. Many times my caregivers ended up assisting resident’s when there were no Brookdale staff to be found. They would do whatever they could to help. Basically my caregivers were 2 unpaid employees working for Brookdale. Brookdale states they may be able to take aggressive residents. There is no way to separate the aggressive residents from the rest of the residents. One of my caregivers witnessed a Health and Wellness director being attacked. One resident allegedly pushed another resident causing her to fall. He is the same resident that threatened to kill my resident and caregiver one evening. There was no RN that was reachable that night. Brookdale is required by law to have an RN on duty and reachable. I called the police. There was no one to let him in and Brookdale didn't provide the police with the correct entry code. Brookdale has a fall monitoring system. It took 14 minutes for the staff to respond when my resident fell one day. They immediately started moving my resident without an assessment. The aides were pulling her up by her arms before supporting her back, and no gait belt was used. The aides had her walking and only took vitals after they put her in the bed. This is very condensed. I have 3 inches of documentation. It would be a mistake to put your loved one at Brookdale.

Our loved one has dementia and after a bout of extreme illness, his brain was unable to recover from an infection meaning he moved from early to late stage in a matter of weeks. It was quick, startling, and left us completely panicked and scared. His condition was so bad so quickly that we could not watch over him properly or safely and had to look at immediate respite care, because the long term care place we chose was not available until a couple months. We thought that Brookdale Eden Prairie would be a safe space where our loved one would be treated with compassion. We were wrong. I was in charge of finding my father in law a respite care location and picking this place made me ultimately so embarrassed and ashamed that I was responsible for putting him here. Right away from the get go after we paid in full and had his first day we started noticing major red flags. They would leave coded doors open and although the outdoor code also has a door they acted so lax about having random doors stay open in a memory care facility. The first night he was there we had an incident where our loved one escaped and tried to become violent (this is his first night away from home and his first experience with a memory care and he was terrified and confused). There was an altercation between the main contact, Christine, and one of our brothers. He spoke to her quite harshly which we found out about later and profusely apologized however that did nothing to alleviate their treatment of us and rather we felt retaliated against as the family despite doing everything in our power to make up for the incident. She made us feel like we were at risk of getting kicked out every day since that incident. She was harsh to us over email, non communicative, and provided no updates except to tell us we would be receiving the results of the investigation soon (by the way, we never received it). Instead of treating Tim and us with a caring attitude knowing we were terrified and he was terrified (and this is normal behavior on his part, actually) she made us feel reprimanded constantly. We apologized consistently for our family member speaking to them like that but he was terrified that our loved one escaped and they were not communicating effectively. From then on we knew that we would receive very bad service from this facility and that they would act with a personal vendetta against us. After that, only worse things started to happen all in the span of 30 days. We watched the med passers throw medications at him that were not on the correct schedule with truly very little compassion. She finally offered a medication report which was supposed to show the exact medications he was receiving and when- we never received that report, ever. We asked for updates on how he was doing, was he eating, making friends, ANY sort of updates that could help a TRULY terrified family, which is going through this for the first time, feel better. Nothing. We were supposed to have cable TV included as part of his stay there and something we paid for, something that would make him much more comfortable as a introvert, and it was never fixed and never worked the whole time he was there. When we kept asking they just said he can watch tv with the other residents. We brought him a laundry basket as we noticed laundry was piling up and they lost the laundry basket. My mother in law started to just take laundry home and bring it back because they wouldn’t do it. They didn’t notify us that meds were running low, there were no hangers in the closers, none of the advertised “activities” at the facility actually happened. When we moved him to the long term facility, Christine included a vengeful and personal message about her altercation with our family member, the new facility told us that is very strange to include, something that should never be put into this type of information passthrough. She did it simply to be vengeful and it was so unprofessional.

We visit our aunt weekly, and she seems happy and well-cared-for. She likes the staff, and they are caring and helpful. My aunt loves the food, and participates in the exercise and bingo.

I volunteer here playing music once a week for the residents, and have been doing this for about two years. Out of the few homes I have played in, this one is my favorite. The staff are so lovely, and they obviously care about all the residents. The place has a homey atmosphere and it just feels very personal. The residents, despite their illness, seem happy and comfortable with the staff. It's a beautiful community.