Blue Heron Assisted Living

Reviewer#RD081021t

Blue Heron Assisted Living is brand new. It had only opened a week when I went out to that one. They already had residents. They only had two in memory care, which is what I was looking at the time. They were just opening up their memory care. It's beautiful as far as the way it looks. It's very clean. The people working are all very excited about what they're doing. It looks like a country club. It is that pretty. It's very expensive. It was definitely the most expensive place I went to. However, they don't do what a lot of these other places do. They don't do tiers. There's just one flat rate, so if you have someone who has dementia, which my mother has. You know that eventually they're going to keep getting worse and needing more and more help; it's not going to cost you any more. Whereas a lot of these other places, if you come in and they say, 'OK, you're you need level one help,' you're charged one thing; then if it goes to level two, you're charged more. Then level three, you're charged even more. The other side of it is they are at about what the other places charge for level three. The staff told me they never go up. When you come in, that's it. You pay that price, it always stays that price. Now that sounds good, but one of the experiences that I found is that once a place is sold to a different corporation or company, things change. There's really no way of controlling whether or not that is going to happen. What people need to realize when they're going into these places, if they get it in writing, that the price can never go up. You are good because then that's in your contract. They showed me everything. They showed me the residents. It was beautiful. I was very impressed with everything they had there. They have a lot of goals for what they want to do. They showed me all the activities that they had planned for memory care, which was very impressive. You don't see it in action because there were only two residents there. That's the only thing I could say right now about them. The facility is clean and beautiful. Most of what I saw was the assisted living, and they looked really happy. In the memory care, we met one resident and her daughter. Her daughter was there with her, and the woman asked permission for us to come in. She gave us permission and we went in. The mother was still in bed. She didn't want to get up, but daughter was trying to get her to encourage her to get out of bed. The daughter seemed to be very, very happy with where her mother was. What was really important to me was how all of the people working there are interacting with the residents or do they have a really good understanding. From what I could see that day I was there, I saw that. The people they were interacting with joked. They laughed with them. They talked to them in a very kind way, and they tried to encourage them to get involved in some activities. From what I saw, it was really nice. They weren't at capacity because they had only been open a week. They have a couple of areas that were like lounge areas, where they could just sit and talk, and this was in the assisted living. They had the very comfortable furniture all around, and some residents were sitting out in there. They had a cafeteria area where they would eat with tables.They could all sit around the tables and such. They have one areawhere people could get a glass of wine if they want it or a beer. They have very large TVs in this lounge area, so that they can sit and watch something together. Then when you get back to the memory care, what I was really impressed with was it looked like you're walking down a street almost. All the doors looked like the outside of your house. It had a little village feeling, which is nice. It appealed to me; I liked that. They also have a separate area where the memory care could eat. If somebody wanted to take them over to the other area where the assisted living is, they could. They did provide a separate place for memory care for people who they were afraid might wander. It was secure so they couldn't just get out and walk around. They had a closed-in area that was like a courtyard where the memory care could go and be outside when the weather was nice; at the same time, they couldn't leave the premises. It was real important that when you have somebody who does elope (and that's the term they're using for people who tend to leave).