It’s hard to make the final decision to put your loved one in a nursing home, and it’s even more difficult to decide which nursing home would be best for them. Since nursing home neglect and abuse happens more often that you would think, it’s important to research potential nursing homes thoroughly before you decide where to place your loved one. Here are three tips on how to choose the best nursing home:
- Use nursing home compare tools: The best way to protect your loved one from nursing home abuse and neglect is to use tools to research the nursing homes in your area to see how they rate. These tools compare nursing homes in your state based on the deficiencies cited by regulators and the penalties imposed in the past few years. A few different nursing home inspect tools available are Medicare’s, ProPublica’s and U.S News and World Reports’.
- Visit nursing homes a few times: When you visit a nursing home, it’s important to not just go once, but to go at least three times during different parts of the day and on different days. Then you can see what the supervisors and staff are like for each shift. Take in the smells and sounds and how the staff is interacting with the residents. Try to attend any family council meetings at the nursing home, so you can talk with families and see what the nursing home is really like.
- Ask key questions: It can be hard to know what to ask a nursing home, but the most important questions you can ask are if the nursing home practices “person-centered care,” as well as “consistent assignment”. Person-centered care means your loved one could make up their own schedule and eat and sleep whenever they please. Consistent assignment means the same staff members would look after your loved one everyday to help them feel more at home.
Even after doing all you can to choose a good nursing home for your loved one, they could still experience nursing home abuse or neglect. If your loved one is a nursing home abuse victim, a Dallas nursing home lawyer can help them get the justice they are entitled to. Contact Crowe Arnold & Majors today to setup your free, no-obligation consultation.
