Inspīr Carnegie Hill

As a Senior Placement Specialist, I am writing to share my experience working with Victor Booker at Inspir. Victor's thoughtful guidance and expertise have been instrumental in achieving ideal placements and positive longterm outcomes for my elder clients and their families. I have brought many clients with complex and challenging care needs to Victor, and he has consistently developed thoughtful solutions where other communities reached an impasse. Victor is caring, compassionate, and attentive, focusing not only on medical needs but also on overall lifestyle and well-being. I feel most fortunate to have him as a trusted partner for my clients. Thank you, Victor, for your continued dedication to exceptional care.

A horrid and traumatic experience. Inspir is a very attractive facility. My sister was admitted to Inspir for their extra care category, Terra. The cost was staggering : $20k per month for a month to month contract for a small studio PLUS a “buy in” of $30k, although I told them she likely wouldn’t be there even two months due to having cancer. As it turns out, she was there just over 2 weeks. They further charged for an optional video fall monitoring program, but I never saw any cameras in her room. We were promised that Inspir could provide strong staff support and could handle most medical issues, due to high staff ratio and 2 nurses available. My sister entered Inspir rather than go to a nursing home following a hospitalization for extensive cancer. I hoped the promised exceptional care and pleasant surroundings would make her final months more comfortable. However, it became increasingly clear that staff had no understanding of her medical needs and tried to make her get out of bed to go to meals, or to shower, even as she became far too weak and ill to do so. Some staff were punitive in their tone, scolding her like a wayward child. One aide told her she wasn’t allowed to have her meals in her room. Despite the supposed fall prevention monitoring, no one came to help her after one of several falls in the middle of the night. (She said she didn’t call staff because they would have yelled at her.). As her health rapidly deteriorated, it became clearer that Inspir staff neither understood nor respected her medical condition. She became incontinent and was left undressed, lying in dirty sheets in her own excrement overnight and into the next day. Staff told me they “had no clean sheets” even though I called the nurse supervisor at 7 pm about the mess. Her bathroom at that time had no towels at all for two days. After a week at Inspir, her doctor told her there nothing more they could do for her medically, and we contracted with Hospice care. It became clear that Inspir staff were ignorant of how to coordinate with them or how to care for an ill person. My sister developed severe pain, and hospice ordered liquid pain meds, but the Inspir aides simply asked her if she wanted a pain pill, ignoring the fact that she had become too weak to respond or take a pill. They then commented “she refuses her pain meds” and walked away, leaving her in her pain. Seeing how inappropriate the care was, Hospice helped me plan to get her out of there as soon as we could arrange for her to go home with full time private care. An ambulance transport came to Inspir to bring her home. My sister died being carried up the stairs to her apartment. I like to think she knew she was home. And that it gave her some peace. The final trauma was that, despite the enormous sums paid for just one month of Terra care, despite the lack of even basic human care given, within 3 days of my sister’s exit from Inspir and her death, Inspir direct billed her bank account for an additional $11,000 because notice of her leaving was one day past their deadline.