Seven Steps to Choose a Nursing Home

1- Generate a list of potential interesting nursing homes in your region. Local newspapers, Yellow Pages and a lot of internet websites provide good and complete information about nursing homes in every state. You can at this step define your primary needs, so you can shorten your list and focus only on pertinent listings.

 

2- Choose a Skilled nursing facility that is licensed and certified by the Department of Health Services to offer permenent skilled nursing care and adaptative care to patients. Such nursing homes provide 24 hour inpatient care and as a minimum, includes physician, skilled nursing, pharmaceutical services, dietary, and various activity programs.

3- Look for a nursing facility that is certified to participate as a skilled health facility under the Medicare program and as a nursing facility (NF) under the Medicaid (Medi-Cal) program. Depending on the certification status of the facility, there are many variations on skilled nursing facilities: The lack of certification for Medicare will mean that the resident’s rehabilitation and therapy services will not be reimbursed by Medicare.

4- Investigate about possible recorded violations of the facility. Especially, pay attention to violations that have a direct or immediate relationship to patient health, his safety, or his security. Also, see if there is any serious complaint involving the nursing home or any important penalty caused by stuff negligence.

5- If you need intermediate care facility/developmentally disabled, ask if the nursing home provides 24 hour care, habilitation services, developmental and supportive health assistance todevelopmentally disabled residents whose primary need is for developmental services, and who have a recurring but intermittent need for skilled nursing care.

6- If you are looking for a residential elderly care facility, verify that the nursing home can accept hospice, dementia and other residents with special medical conditions. However, please note that such facilites are not medical facilities, and therefore are not licensed to provide medical care but licensed by the Department of Social Services and are not certified to accept Medi-Cal or Medicare reimbursements.

7- Calculate total cost to avoid surprises. Even if sometimes some costs are not predictable you can at least have a good idea about expenses range. Of course, at this step you can take under account the amount that will be reimbursed by the Medicare. In general, nursing home stuff can help you with many useful information about services and their respective costs.

Check www.anursinghome.com for a nursing home guide in the USA

 

Other Nursing Home Articles

Read More

BOOKS
Coming soon. Please come back for a big collection of new books!