VITAS Healthcare

A big ol’ Thank You - especially to Erica RN, Andrea NP and Chaplain Mary. The entire Vitas family was unfailingly professional and helpful. When I saw the negative reviews I can conceive that communications between families and caregivers were flawed likely from expectations that were unrealistic. I will not take a single shining star from these kind, generous Humans who performed beautifully under pressure. My admiration and thanks - Maggie RN

I’m giving this business 2 stars because they do have a few great people but they are poorly staffed when it comes to critical care which is when I needed them the most. I needed critical care on the weekend and they didn’t have anyone that wanted to work. I ended up switching hospice care because of this. They “contract” a bed at ascension where he was taken, but they were so slow getting him admitted as a hospice patient, that he had to be treated as hospital patient. Their hospital bed barely worked too. I would never recommend them.

VITAS at St. Augustine has a wonderful team to work alongside in the healthcare community. Professional and compassionate. Big Thank you to Jennifer Levesque RN Team Manager for all her support with our clients!

When choosing a palliative to end of life care group please do your research! The experience that my family had with Vitas was not what you would like for your loved one. The group from Vitas came in strong with the admittance team from the 2010 Vistas group showing up the next day of us contacting them. We had 3 days of visits and setting up our future care team. We were pleased to see how attentive that they were. The following week we heard nothing, and we had a concern and needed to speak with the care team. We ended up reaching out to the admittance nurse, who was not too thrilled that a patients family was reaching out to her from the 207 Vitas group, knowing that no one had initiated our visit and started preparing us for our first visit with the nurse. It took several calls and threats to rush my loved one to the ER to finally have a nurse runner show up at our house to check on our loved one. The next day our nurse showed up and examined our loved one. She gave instructions to take blood pressure up to 6 times a day with a BP schedule to follow. We tried to do this but it was too much for our loved one and being elderly it was uncomfortable so we only took as needed. The nurse was not pleased as other health issues arouse, as our loved one was in pain or discomfort with a bowel blockage the nurse advised us that we overdosed him with too much softner and that we needed to chase him around taking his blood pressure instead of trying to x-ray his abdomen to find out where the blockage was, as we were instructed would be the next step in care to relieve his discomfort. Instead, he suffered for a week with this pain until one of the nurses administered the proper treatment and guideline to getting him relief! When our regular nurse returned she was unprofessional and would yell and argue with us the family caregivers in front of her nurse practitioner and our loved one her patient which made him agitated and upset! Even when being directed to stop she continued and would consistently lay the blame of lack of care on everyone but herself! Our loved one continued to have more episodes and his health continued to fail. The nurse practitioner and the nurse both came out on a Tuesday morning evaluated our loved one and informed us that his status was being changed from weeks to months to days to weeks, and sent us narcotics via Fed EX, it was left at our door with no signature required, the only reason we knew it had come was because we were standing in view of the door and could see the truck, the driver did not knock or ring the door bell. After that we did not hear anything else from Vitas. The medications being left at the door was the last straw, our family changed to another group in town. The day that we had the new group coming out was exactly a week from when the last time that we had heard anything from Vitas, they called us that afternoon, the following morning we had to transfer our loved one to the Baily Center the nurse called us that morning and argued that she wanted lay her eyes on our loved one more time before he left his house. We told her No! Not only was this very unprofessional it rude to our family who was preparing to say good bye to our loved one! This is our experience and we wanted to share this so that other families do not go through anything similar, and hopefully by sharing our experience it will help Vitas work the bugs out so no other families go through anything similar!