It’s crucial to select an appropriate nursing home for you or your loved one. Abbott Skilled Nursing & Rehabilitation Center has prepared a simple guide you can follow in order to select the best nursing home that offers the best quality of care:
1. Search for Nursing Homes In Your Area.
There are many ways to find nursing homes within your community, such as:
- Using a tool provided by Medicare here: www.medicare.gov/NHCompare. Search by name, city, county, state, or ZIP code.
- Asking for referrals from someone who has had experience with a nursing care facility, as well as doctors, friends, family, loved ones, and even neighbors.
- Asking a hospital’s discharge planner is recommended if you’re currently in the hospital or call your local social service agency for assistance.
- Contacting your local agency on Aging can also get you a list of long-term care options.
2. Compare Your Options and Their Quality of Services.
There are multiple ways for you to probe into your various nursing care facility options. First, ensure that they have conducted health and fire safety inspections to guarantee the residents’ safety. Investigate the complaints filed against the facilities, with a special focus on elderly abuses. Pay attention to the environment of the nursing home, the interaction dynamics between the Residents and healthcare professionals, and the services themselves.
Additionally, every nursing home should develop assessment tools for their residents based on approved standards to determine what improvements need to be done. And when they do implement improvements, you need to find out if the attempts have been successful. Pay attention to what other people have to say about the facility.
Furthermore, make sure that the activities offered by the nursing homes are appropriate and customized to the unique needs of their clients.
3. Take a Tour of Their Facility
You must enjoy a higher quality of life inside the nursing home of your choice, not a downgraded one, and visiting the facilities is one way of ensuring this. You can interact with the staff, talk with the residents and their families, and do ocular inspections of the facilities themselves. Consider space, amenities, facilities, and the overall structure of the place.
Take note of each facility’s location, availability, compliance with Civil Rights and other legal measures, and method of planning the care plan. The facility should involve you and your family in the planning phase to ensure better and client-centered outcomes, and how their care plans are carried out.
During your visit, you should be able to see professional staff. 24-hour staff means that there are lesser occurrences of escalated emergencies. Examine their credentials, what policies they have developed, and what they have implemented in their security and operations. They should have certifications and licenses to support their claims for expertise.
Find out about how they charge their services and how they connect with other healthcare facilities such as hospitals to ensure well-rounded care to their Residents. Make sure you go for a facility that does not discriminate based on religion, culture, gender, language, ethnicity, and age.
Schedule your appointment so you will be entertained thoroughly when you conduct your facility visit. We recommend that you visit more than once so you can differentiate between the staff handling you on different days.
4. Choose the Nursing Home that Meets Your Needs.
You can choose the nursing care facility that meets your unique needs based on the information above. You can always transfer to a different facility after moving in if you think their services are not meeting your expectations. Know where you stand and carefully read any documents that you’re required to fill out. Make sure that the facility fulfills everything stated in the agreement.
For more information, please feel free to send us a message.