The reviews for River Run Healthcare of Portsmouth present a sharply divided portrait, with a preponderance of severe negative complaints alongside a smaller set of strongly positive personal experiences. A majority of summaries raise serious safety, hygiene, and clinical-care concerns: persistent foul urine odors, reports of residents being heavily urine-saturated, and an overall sense of unsanitary conditions. Multiple reviewers describe rotten food, broken or unavailable amenities (for example, televisions), and poor facility upkeep. These facility and hygiene issues appear to be recurring themes across several negative accounts.
Clinical care and safety emerge as the most critical areas of concern. Reviewers report medication administration failures (meds not given, medications found on the floor), delayed or inadequate responses to respiratory needs (delayed oxygen), and wound-care negligence that, in at least one account, led to hospitalization. Other accounts describe residents left unattended in bed for months and general neglect. Taken together, these comments indicate systemic lapses in basic clinical oversight, medication management, wound care protocols, and timely medical response.
Communication and staffing responsiveness are major negative themes. Numerous reviewers mention unresponsive nursing staff, unanswered call buttons, and phones that go unanswered. Several reviews emphasize a lack of follow-up after incidents, absence of humane treatment, and situations where residents were effectively stranded — with families forced to arrange and pay for transportation because staff did not provide assistance. These complaints suggest problems with staffing levels, staff training, or management oversight that affect day-to-day responsiveness and family communication.
Counterbalancing the negative reports are multiple positive testimonials praising specific staff and the overall atmosphere in some cases. Several reviewers call the staff “the sweetest people,” describe staff who treat residents like family, and note acts of kindness such as volunteering to do makeup, nails, and lead activities like karaoke. Some families explicitly state that staff treated their loved ones fairly and with respect and express gratitude for the care provided. These positive comments indicate that there are staff members who deliver compassionate, resident-centered interactions and meaningful activities.
The overall pattern is therefore polarized: a significant volume of serious complaints about hygiene, clinical care, safety, and communication contrasted with personal accounts of warm, attentive staff and engaging activities. This split suggests inconsistency in care quality — potentially varying by shift, unit, or specific staff members — rather than uniformly poor or uniformly excellent performance. Prospective families should note both the severity and recurrence of safety and clinical-care allegations as well as the documented instances of compassionate staff behavior.
In summary, the reviews raise major red flags about sanitation, medication management, wound care, timeliness of medical responses, and staff responsiveness at River Run Healthcare of Portsmouth, while also highlighting that some staff provide kind, respectful, and engaging care. The balance of evidence from these summaries points to inconsistent care quality with several serious incidents reported; however, there are clear examples of dedicated employees who improve resident experience. The most prominent themes are (1) urgent safety and hygiene concerns requiring attention, (2) lapses in clinical and medication procedures, (3) poor communication and responsiveness from staff/management, and (4) pockets of genuine compassion and activity programming. These patterns should be carefully weighed by anyone evaluating this facility, and families may wish to seek further information such as recent inspection reports, staffing ratios, and references from current residents or families to better understand how widespread the negative issues are versus episodic or isolated positive care experiences.
