Review of Lake Balboa Care Center

2 Star User Review

A Noisy and Smelly Place

My father, who cannot speak English, stayed at this facility in the second half of November 2011, and had to cut his stay short, before completion of his rehab treatment for his complete knee replacement surgery, because he could not stand the discomfort and annoyance any longer. When we went for a tour of the facility before the surgery, we were told that my father would be in a room with one roommate, and they took us to meet one patient in a two-bed room with no roommate. All looked and sounded good.

Unfortunately, once he was transferred to the facility the reality was much different. He was put in a room with three elderly roommates. The first problem--noise-- became immediately apparent; they had installed four regular flat screen TV sets on the walls with the speakers inside the TV set rather than next to the bed head of patients, with no head phones. If one patient wanted to watch TV, the sound would fill the room and the other patients had to just put up with it, or just keep raising the volume on their own TV set to watch what they wished to watch on their own TV set! We brought this problem to the attention of the person in charge; but she could not find a working head phone in the facility, and she informed us that they had to purchase some new head phones, which of course never arrived during my father's two-week stay! Two of his roommates also had the bad habit of chitchatting with a loud voice and watching TV well into the night and early morning, and no nurse ever bothered to keep an eye on them and ask them to be considerate of the other patients who needed to rest after such major surgeries. When we asked if my father could be moved to another room with less noise, they said they will try, but nothing ever happened.

Moreover, we were told that they had an interpreter on staff, and communication would not be a problem. That too turned out to be false, and communication was a big problem, to the point that family members had to take turns to be with him throughout the day.

Regarding the smell problem, this is an old one-story square building with an atrium in the center and hallways around it with rooms on both sides of the hallways. The A/C for the building worked only in the hallways, not the rooms. Each room had a wall-mounted heater/cooler with no ventilation to the outside for fresh air--it just circulated the stale, and stuffy air inside the room. The only source of fresh air were the windows. In hot summer days or cold winter days, even the windows cannot be used. Most patients in such facilities are the elderly and some wear adult diapers, and I had the misfortune of witnessing one of my father's roommates pass some gas multiple times while lying in bed! That room was smelly most of the time, and first thing I did every time I went to visit my father was to open the window by his bed if it were not open already—that was the only ventilation and source of clean fresh air!

Regarding the staff, some were very caring, nice and even bent backward to help my father, and some seemed to be untrained, apathetic, and unhelpful. The food was OK although sometimes we had to get meals from outside because the food was not that appealing.

The staff at this facility all bragged about the good reputation of their physical therapy department, which my father benefited from perhaps 2-3 hours a day. That is why I gave this facility 2 stars rather than 1 star. It was the bad experience during the other 21-22 hours per day that drove him to cut his stay short and forgo the physical therapy treatments he badly needed.