St. Gabriel Athens

for a local A Place for Mom advisor

13 Reviews

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  A Place For Mom

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  SeniorAdvisor.com

This is really just assisted living with a locked door in the memory care unit. The layout is not conducive to easy navigation for your memory impaired loved one. The staff is ill trained in memory care and some were so uncaring, made my dad cry a lot. If I hadn't bathed my dad, he would have smelled bad all the time. They would put clean clothes on him over soiled skin and never brushed his teeth. Lack of supervision at night is appalling. I stayed over night several times before we moved dad.

The quality of care that my 90-something mother received at Thrive during the 6 months that she lived in the Memory Care wing there was, frankly, a little shocking to me. The staff seemed mostly young, mostly not very experienced, but okay for the most part (professional though not particularly compassionate); they tried to do their jobs, but there never seemed to be enough of them on the floor at any given time, so they always seemed rushed and too often seemed annoyed that they had to deal with frail elderly people. The administrators were hands-off, unresponsive, and bizarrely out to lunch -- *hugely* different than the admin I encountered at both the assisted care community where my mother lived before coming to Thrive and the memory care community where she went after Thrive (both of which, luckily, were lovely, extremely professional, and very easy to work with). Honestly I've never seen anything quite like it. After 6 months of watching my mom's health and peace of mind deteriorate, my husband and I moved her to another (really wonderful) memory facility in Jefferson where -- thank goodness! -- both staff and administration were superb, and (not surprisingly) my mother did much better. I just wish she hadn't had to spend half a year in a place where a whole lot of thought and attention (and money) seemed to have been spent on a pretty, new building and so very, very little seemed to have been spent on enhancing the quality of the lives of the elderly people who lived in it.