Selecting which nursing home to place your loved one can be a daunting task, and often the choice is made more stressful because your choice may be pressured by a health issue your loved on might be dealing with. When time may not exactly be on your side in a matter so sensitive, how can you be sure that you’re making the right choice?

Luckily, there are several essential criteria you can use to weed out nursing homes of questionable from legitimate, quality facilities: proximity, Medicare and Medi-Cal membership, whether it meets public regulations, and whether it offers amenities that meet your needs.

Medicare/Medi-Cal

Among the most important factors when it comes to nursing homes is cost. Nursing home care, typically, is very expensive, and not many folks can afford it in the long term. Thankfully many California nursing homes are signatories to both Medi-Cal and Medicare.

Medicare’s short-term benefit for nursing homes doesn’t last for long, but since it covers up to 100 days of skilled nursing care following a hospital stay of three days or more, it’s often sufficient to gain admission to a quality home.

Medi-Cal, California’ equivalent of Medicare, covers 2 out of 3 eligible nursing home residents in the state, due to the high cost of nursing homes. The California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform website (canhr.org), offers a wealth of resources on Medi-Cal and nursing home eligibility.

But even if you don’t qualify, selecting a Medi-Cal affiliated facility will protect you in limited ways, since unaffiliated facilities are able to remove your loved one if you cannot pay your bills, while Medi-Cal facilities cannot do that.

Location

Choosing a home close to you will make everyone happy. Nursing home residents who are visited often tend to recover more quickly, are more positive, respond to the good wishes of their relatives, and tend to receive a better caliber of care, because frequent resident monitoring by people with a vested interest in their wellbeing can keep track of the resident’s condition, make informed care decisions and respond to a sudden health development.

Quality

CANHR offers a Nursing Home Guide to help inform you of the quality of certain nursing homes, including each facility’s record of incidents, citations, and faults, which can offer a good, although partial, impression of the prospective facility. With this information, combined with your own experience on a visit to a prospective facility, you can make a reasonably good determination of the quality of a nursing home. Also, state law mandates that nursing homes post their latest inspection report in full view of the public, so ask to view these when you visit a facility.

Special Needs

Make sure you list any special care requirements that your loved one will have, such as respiratory care or additional assistance due to dementia-associated behavior. Ask plenty of questions of the prospective facilities to make sure they can provide for your loved one in the proper way.

References

Whenever you can, seek anecdotal information about prospective facilities from trusted friends and associates. Ask anyone you are aware has a loved one in a home themselves for their recommendations. Strike up a conversation with visitors at prospective nursing homes to get their view of how their loved ones are doing. Whoever you happen to ask, getting verbal input on a prospective home can be more informative than any report.

Personal Visits

When you finally decide to begin visiting nursing homes, an important thing to remind yourself is “don’t judge a book by its cover.” A more modest looking facility may provide more sensitive and thorough care than a larger facility that impresses superficially, but may actually provide less intensive care. When you visit, make sure to ask to visit the entire facility, including the areas you may never see again on a typical visit, including the kitchens and areas normally off limits to residents.

Compare your gut feeling upon visiting a home to that of others you’ve visited. Think on the reception you received from the facility staff. All these experiences together can do much toward making your final decision on a home easier. To simplify things, create a checklist for all the things you want out of a home. To save time, you can print out CANHR’s Nursing Home Evaluation Checklist to assist you in evaluating prospective homes.

Arranging Care During Hospitalization

Nursing homes receive a lot of admissions from hospitals. if a loved one requires medical care, get in touch with the hospital’s discharge planning or social work office for assistance in planning nursing home care. Hospitals are required to help those about to be discharged arrange the care and services they’ll need once they leave, as hospitals cannot send patients to nursing homes without their consent and cannot charge for overstays without meeting their discharge planning obligations.