Top 10 Reasons Why the Brian Center in Mooresville is the Kiss of Death for your Loved Ones
Aging parents and grandparents can present all of us with challenges. As they get older, health can begin to fail or an event like a fall can start your journey towards a master’s degree on our nation’s messed up healthcare system.
But with Medicare, things get complicated quickly. The Emergency Room is covered for just 3 days leaving you with some serious unknowns for longer-term rehab needs for your loved ones. Since most families only deal with rare medical emergencies once in a blue moon, you end up jumping in with both feet into some very icy waters, like we did.
Every journey starts with high hopes. But when it comes to healthcare, not all facilities are created equal. How your loved ones are cared for and treated on an emotional level can radically affect outcomes. That’s why the most important thing you can do as an advocate for your family member in need is to understand the differences between the “party line” and reality.
The party line is what you’re told when you take a tour of a facility. It’s also reinforced over the phone when you call in. With the advent of blogs and social media, it’s easier than ever for all of us to band together and share more of these realities so others can make better decisions. In the end, there are just some facilities that should be avoided.
Take the Brian Center in Mooresville for example. Their party line is so far from reality its horrifyingly shocking. And while some examples may seem far-fetched or unreal, know that as we experienced them first hand we had trouble grasping the reality of them as well.
Below are our top 10 reasons to avoid the Brian Center in Mooresville like the plague:
1. NATURE CALLS: After an “event” like a fall or surgery, your loved one will most likely start off using a bedpan. While this is rarely the end of the world, the Brian Center in Mooresville takes it one step further – they’ll let your loved one stew in their own filth for hours on end before a changing. For example, waits of two to three hours were typical unless family was present – and even with family present and demanding staff attention, a 45-minute to one-hour wait was typical. Not only is this unsanitary, leading to a bacterial infection with our loved one, but it is humiliating as well. The Brian Center in Mooresville will tell you they check on patients every 15 minutes (party line). This will make you feel good – until you witness the reality that they are checked on about once a 12-hour shift –if you’re lucky.
2. MEDICATION RETARDATION: Medications can have all sorts of nasty side effects like constipation, dehydration and depletion of electrolytes that create dangerous situations for the elderly. Mixing drugs together can also create confusion and strange behavioral side effects. Not to worry though, the Brian Center at Mooresville will pump your loved ones into catatonic vegetables with little regard to the consequences. Then, when they’re high on pain medications and other drugs, the Brian Center at Mooresville will witness behavioral incidents and apply even more drugs and create more dangerous combinations. Our loved one entered the facility with a straightforward injury but left on depression medication, dangerously low sodium levels, and pneumonia – none of which she had ever had in her entire life and all of which were well documented side effects of drugs she was given that the family never approved (and cautioned heavily against).
3. ROUGHNECKS: The elderly need a special hand, and not just a physical one. A solid emotional bedside manner is usually the minimum cost of entry to care for the elderly. But when you hire minimum wage employees, many of whom barely have training, you can expect not care, but carelessness. At the Brian Center in Mooresville, our loved one had her blankets ripped off in anger, her injury aggravated from rough handling, and even hoarseness one evening from begging for over an hour for help in getting more comfortable form the pain.
4. SOYLENT GREEN: Well, it’s not people they serve at the Brian Center at Mooresville, it’s more like food your dogs would have trouble eating. A stay at this facility will leave you dreaming for some of the fast food the staff eats as they laugh and joke around because they’re too busy to help their patients eat. If your loved one has any taste buds left, you can expect massive loss of appetite. Not to worry though, the first night our loved one was in the facility the food was summarily dropped off in the room while our loved one was sleeping. What’s worse – crappy food, or cold crappy food? We’re still not sure.
5. COMMUNICATION GAPS: The party line is delivered efficiently whenever you call. But being in the facility is quite different. You can expect no notification when medications change and everything is always just dandy with your loved one who is “going just fine”. For example, we were told our loved one was recovering nicely despite the fact that we knew from firsthand experience that she was eating poorly and being overmedicated against her wishes. Suffice it to say that the party line is so strongly adhered to at this facility that you can put money on the fact that they know absolutely nothing about the details of your loved one when you call. You can also be assured that any follow up action items the staff is supposed to take will never be completed.
6. ERRORS & OMMISSIONS: Most facilities rigorously chart and document medications and care. But at the Brian Center in Mooresville, data is separated between manual notebooks, some sort of centralized database and the staff’s poor memory. This creates a nightmare if you are trying to determine what medications your loved one was given. For example, it took us 45 minutes and research with three different staff members (one of which barely spoke English) to determine the last time pain medications were administered. In the end, the only reason we figured out the whole story was because we witnessed medications being given firsthand – and they were never documented anywhere. Want to know the best part? When we finally had her transferred, the transfer request was initiated by a family member with no power of attorney. We remain confident to this day that we could have (and probably should have) evacuated the entire building to other facilities because of the complete lack of controls and management at the facility. It’s not just that the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing – it’s that the right hand and the left hand are completely cut off from each other with absolutely zero knowledge of who is doing what.
7. NIGHT OF THE WALKING DEAD: If you think there is even a glimmer of hope of your loved one recovering at a facility like this, enter the night staff. By cutting the staff to a skeletal crew, the Brian Center at Mooresville ensures adequate care is impossible to give. These are some of the most neglectful and downright angry people on the planet. They’re pissed off and ready to go home at all hours. It’s called learned helplessness. When you’re in an environment where you can’t possibly win – you give up. You can expect staff members to chat it up at the nursing stations and generally ignore warning bells. For example, it is routine to hear in bed alarms for over an hour before patients get attention. Sleeping over at the center with your loved ones is worse than a park bench in Chicago as lights and alarm bells go off like the fourth of July with little to no response from the staff who has clearly experienced too many shotguns going off next to their ears. In another example, our loved one had her oxygen lines crimped and forcibly tied to the bed so that their head couldn’t physically move.
8. THE WAX MUSEUM: Of course staying in bed and not moving is absolutely horrible for patient recovery. But somehow the Brian Center in Mooresville goes out of their way to leave patients in the same spot for days on end. For example, our loved one was supposed to be moved regularly. For the duration of her 5 day stay, the only time she was moved was when family members demanded it. You can expect bedsores and more at facilities like this and the lack of movement exacerbated our loved one’s declining health and mental fortitude.
9. BATHING & HYGIENE: Get your clothespins ready because you’re about to be disgusted. Not only does the Brian Center neglect general bathing and cleanliness, if your loved one has an injury you can expect the dressings to be completely ignored. For example, our loved ones gaps in between baths would last days – yes days – despite the fact that she was wearing depends. In addition, her injury was never inspected and only until family forced the nurse to unwrap and smell the tissue breakdown did it actually get corrected. You can expect nothing but additional complications and concerns when it comes to cleanliness at this facility. While the floors look mostly clean, your loved ones injuries are the exact opposite.
10. GENERAL AMMENITIES: Most facilities have general amenities in their rooms. In the Brian Center of Mooresville, they have none. In fact, we would argue you basically are getting a room, a bed and crappy food dropped off in the room now and then. Everything else is up to you. For example, there are no phones in any of the rooms. One evening we watched an elderly patient beg the staff to use the phone to call his wife. Only until after we threatened the staff on his behalf to let him use the phone was he able to place the call. This creates a dangerous separation between you and your loved one so that if you are far away from the facility, you have no earthly hope of ever getting the real deal straight from the horses mouth.
SUMMARY
If it’s one thing to take away from this experience it is to become resolved that you cannot manage your loved one’s healthcare from a recliner or phone. If you do, you’ll forever be hearing what you want to hear while someone you love is suffering immeasurably. The recliner will hide the reality from you until it is too late.
We were able to get our loved one moved to a different facility, but we still had to deal with pneumonia, tissue breakdown, dangerously low sodium and potassium levels and enough stress to almost kill our loved one. It took a few ER visits to get things corrected and stabilized and eventually our loved one recovered.
I am confident that had we not interceded when we did, this would be memorial article and not a warning one. The Brian Center in Mooresville is an archaic fossil left over from a time where neglect and hideously poor management decision-making could fly under the radar. Where the old are converted into money as gun slinging “care givers” are free to keep patients from complaining by grossly overmedicating them.
Patients are ruthlessly neglected until the physical and emotional battle is lost. As these poor souls rest catatonically for hours to stew in their own foul and stench, the Brian Center simply piles meds on top of meds to treat not root problems, but rather symptoms on top of symptoms they themselves created. In the end, your loved one will end up worse off, and on more medications than you ever dreamed possible.
Of course there are a few gems in the form of caregivers on the staff, but a handful of bright lights gets lost under the incompetent management and total lack of leadership. This horrid excuse for a “care facility” is more like a bunch of minimum wage employees getting paid peanuts and being asked to handle insurmountable numbers of patients they can’t possibly attend to.
Our loved one said it best as she described how she felt completely unsafe: “You just can’t recover at a facility like that”.
CONCLUSIONS
You should do your own research before even considering this facility. We recommend talking with other caregivers in the area – including the hospitals. You’ll learn quickly that not only are there other horror stories of deaths and poor treatment at this facility, but the incredibly poor reputation of the Brian Center of Moorseville is actually very well known amongst actual licensed caregivers.
How the facility has lasted this long is beyond us. But thing is for sure – it needs to be shut down, like five years ago.
by Anonymous
xxx.xxx.242.44
May 18, 2013
