The Bradford Senior Living

Families, do your loved ones a favor. Do your homework. Ask for a list of health conditions for which the Bradford will refuse reentry after a hospital stay and leave them stranded and scampering. They did this to my mother despite a $10K/month and a staggering $6K for community fee, disproportionately high for its caliber. When there was talk of a potential peg tube prior to registration, it was met with silence. The sign-on was accelerated with eager, frequent text communication through the weekend, but only until the check was received from my elderly father. No red flags, not even a mention of what might happen to my mother if a peg tube was inserted in the future. Upon move in, we found that their head nurse Kenisha and caregiver staff, and some others, were genuinely competent and caring. They are the Bradford’s assets despite its management. By contrast, its top local leadership who trumpets her nursing degree, the corporate nurse who lacks in experience and most certainly in empathy, their salesperson who puts on a false air of empathy prior to registration and staff who suspiciously hover around trying to eavesdrop on your conversations are incompetent and non-empathetic penny counters who believe they have the license to play God with seniors’ lives. When my mother returned to the hospital for the second time in a few days because the hospital released her prematurely before her UTI test results, they inserted a peg tube in her stomach to ensure that she had a backup method to receive nutrition and medication until her nutrition was back on track. She had been through many changes from overseas travel on a 40+ hr journey, to being at home upon arrival to moving to the Bradford we assumed would be her permanent home in proximity of her granddaughters. Being a dementia patient, these changes understandably caused nutrition intake challenges which would have tided over once she found stability in her new environment. However, she had an underlying UTI infection that was not discovered by the hospital until after she had been released back to the Bradford, resulting in a second hospital stay and a peg tube insertion to aid in her nutrition until she got fully acclimatized to her new “home” at the Bradford. Little did we know that she would be rejected from her new “home” despite the hefty payment and less than a week of residence at the Bradford. At first, the verdict from the management was that if we had a skilled nurse take care of my mother she could be readmitted to the Bradford. Later this vacillated to a complete refusal to readmit unless my mother was placed on hospice. Moreover, the corporate nurse was brazen enough to misinform us that hospice was a commonplace convenience, and families could place a patient on/off hospice at will. We later learned that this was inaccurate and that hospice entails stopping medical treatment except for what is feasible on location by hospice staff. We were not ready to sign off on my mother’s life, she was precious to us. This left my mother stranded and sent us scrambling to identify a place that would accept her at short notice, leading us to a non-optimal last-minute choice that led to my mother’s death within a week. If you are healthy and intend to remain so, then the Bradford is a good option for you. If there is a chance of an extended health condition, then you should be prepared for the Bradford to play God and dictate to your family as to when you should be placed on hospice, if not, deny you readmittance and leave you stranded. Of course, they wouldn’t refund the feesyou’re your care either, despite not providing care. The worst part - my parents would never have selected the Bradford, were it not to be close to me. In my effort to bring my mother closer, I lost her completely, because I trusted the Bradford’s excellent sales pitch and bought into the façade of leaders who lack empathy, place profit over people, and think it okay to play God with the lives of vulnerable seniors.