Overall sentiment across the reviews is mixed, with clear strengths in therapy/rehabilitation and compassionate individual caregivers, but significant concerns about consistency, safety, and operational management. The most consistent positive theme is the quality of rehabilitative services: occupational therapy, speech therapy and the broader rehab team receive repeated praise. Reviewers describe the rehab staff as skilled, attentive, and in some cases "like family," and multiple commenters report strong recovery progress and gratitude for rehab outcomes.
Staff behavior and interpersonal care also appear as a strong point for many families. Numerous reviews highlight caring, responsive nurses and aides, good communication with families, strong bereavement support when residents died, and staff who took time to answer questions and attend to dietary needs. Several reviewers explicitly recommend the facility for rehab and note bright, cheerful, and neat facility areas.
However, these positives are counterbalanced by persistent and serious negatives. Staffing shortages and high turnover are repeatedly cited and appear to impact care reliability: long waits for help, delayed responses, and instances where residents were left in soiled clothing or rooms. Multiple reviewers specifically call out short-staffing on the rehab floor. Cleanliness reports are contradictory — while some families describe the facility as clean and well-maintained, others report unclean or dirty conditions, suggesting inconsistency across units or shifts.
Safety and clinical management concerns are particularly serious in some reviews. There are reports of medication errors and critical incidents, including a seizure where medication was allegedly not administered and a reported death attributed by the family to lack of medication. Such accounts indicate potential lapses in medication administration and monitoring. In addition, reviewers criticized the facility's COVID handling — notably moving COVID-positive residents to non-COVID floors — which raised infection-control concerns for those families.
Dining and daily living services receive mixed feedback. Several families praise meals and dietary diligence, whereas others describe food as bland and lacking condiments (examples include repeated mashed potatoes with no gravy or insufficient butter). This again points to uneven service quality. Activities programming is noted as full and offering opportunities, but some reviews say active family advocacy is needed for residents to participate fully.
Operational issues beyond frontline care also appear: billing problems and unreturned billing inquiries were mentioned, and some families reported abrupt or disputed discharges that coincided with worse health outcomes after rehab. There are also reports of rude or abusive aides in a few reviews, which contrasts sharply with other accounts of compassionate staff and underscores variability in staff behavior and training.
In summary, Elderwood at Hornell appears to provide strong rehabilitative therapy and has many individual staff members who are compassionate and responsive, often providing notable emotional support to families. Yet significant and recurring concerns about staffing levels, inconsistent cleanliness and food quality, medication safety, COVID practices, and administrative issues create a mixed overall picture. Prospective families should weigh the facility's strong rehab credentials and some excellent caregiver experiences against reported safety incidents and variability by unit or shift. Where possible, families may want to: (1) ask specifically about staffing ratios on the unit of interest, (2) inquire about medication administration protocols and incident history, (3) observe meal service and cleanliness during visits, and (4) get clarity on discharge policies and billing contacts to reduce the risk of the negative outcomes described in several reviews.
