Nursing Homes
Be nice to your children. After all, they are going to choose your nursing home - Steven Wright
image by: Freedom Aged Care
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There’s A Better Alternative To Nursing Homes And No One’s Talking About It
Once an aging parent loses the ability to function on his or her own, it becomes the child's responsibility to ensure she or he is taken care of. For many, that means putting their parent somewhere safe. Instead of helping our elderly, we are instead trapping them in places of boredom, depression, neglect, and abuse.
The Problem
Facilities for the elderly, originally created as a by-product of an effort to free up hospital beds, haven't improved much since then. One in three people who are admitted to a nursing home will die within a year, yet fewer than 15% receive hospice care.
While the quality of care for the elderly is dismal, we still pay millions…
Resources
Best Nursing Homes
U.S. News has collected meaningful data and ratings about nearly every nursing facility in the United States, and built from them a searchable database designed to highlight the highest-rated homes likely to meet each user's needs.
Nursing Home Compare
The primary purpose of this tool is to provide detailed information about the past performance of every Medicare and Medicaid certified nursing home in the country.
NursingHomes.com
Nursing home locator by state, care type or metro area.
Prepare Nursing Homes for the Next Coronavirus Wave
The most effective way to save lives would be to improve infection control in assisted-living facilities.
'A Slow Killer': Nursing Home Residents Wither in Isolation Forced by the Virus
Covid-19 continues to scythe through the halls of long-term care facilities despite an array of safety measures and bans on visitors, put in place months ago to slow the devastation.
How to Improve and Protect Nursing Homes From Outbreaks
More than a third of America’s Covid-19 deaths can be traced back to these facilities. Experts suggest several ways to make them safer.
What’s Behind the Nursing Home Horror
After decades of mistreatment, older Americans are bearing the worst of the pandemic.
Coronavirus is renewing a call to abolish nursing homes
“Why do we have these facilities where people are not receiving proper care?” said Susan Dooha, the executive director of the Center for Independence of the Disabled, New York, which advocates for people with disabilities, including those that result from aging. “Maybe we don’t need them.”
Ideal Nursing Homes: Individual Rooms, Better Staffing, More Accountability
There have long been ideas among people who study nursing homes — or work in them — for ways to make them safer and more humane. Before the pandemic, these ideas weren't of much interest to anyone outside the field. But those proposed innovations are now attracting a wider audience.
Nursing homes are especially vulnerable to Covid-19. Here’s what it’s like to work in one
A third of US coronavirus deaths have happened in nursing homes. Here’s what workers are doing to keep residents safe.
Why the future of elder care may be fewer nursing homes
Safety, familiarity, community – for many of us, those are key to aging well. So why does so much elder care struggle to provide them? Advocates for nursing care reform hope changes can align our systems with our values.
Building Better Nursing Homes
After plenty of isolated successes, the question isn't what good nursing homes look like, but how to transform existing facilities into places that look like them.
Frontline
… I think people who don't have family are more likely actually to be in the nursing home; and that if you have good family support, you can stay out of the nursing home longer or stay out of it entirely. I have many patients that I know that if we put them in a nursing home -- and this isn't to say anything bad about nursing homes -- [but] even [at] the best nursing homes they would get bedsores; they would be unhappy and probably die much [more quickly]. I don't think there's any question about that.
New rules give nursing home residents more power
The changes reflect a shift toward more “person-centered care,” including requirements for speedy development of care plans, more flexibility and variety in meals and snacks, greater review of a resident’s drug regimen, better security, improved grievance procedures, and scrutiny of involuntary discharges.
Reducing depression in nursing homes requires more than just antidepressants
More than half (52%) of aged care residents have symptoms of depression, compared with 10-15% of older people living in the community. As well as feelings of sadness and low mood, aged care residents with depression feel uninterested in activities, hopeless about the future, guilty about the past and may desire death. Some actively contemplate taking their own lives.
The way America pays for nursing homes is a disaster. So how do other countries do it?
Most of the countries that have universal long-term care coverage — the Netherlands, Japan, Germany — use a dedicated payroll tax to finance the system. Countries with more restricted long-term care coverage — like the United States and United Kingdom — rely on general government revenue. That could, unlike a dedicated tax, leave services more vulnerable to cutting.
U.S. Just Made It a Lot Less Difficult to Sue Nursing Homes
The federal agency that controls more than $1 trillion in Medicare and Medicaid funding has moved to prevent nursing homes from forcing claims of elder abuse, sexual harassment and even wrongful death into the private system of justice known as arbitration.
There’s A Better Alternative To Nursing Homes And No One’s Talking About It
Instead of helping our elderly, we are instead trapping them in places of boredom, depression, neglect, and abuse.
Top five resident complaints about nursing homes (and what to do about them)
Solutions can be as simple as the problems themselves.
Nursing Home Abuse Center
The (NHAC) was founded on time-honored principles of restoring dignity for some of our most vulnerable and valuable citizens.
NursingHomeRating.org
Research and reports on nursing homes across the US. Find survey and abuse reports on your local nursing home facility. Use our nursing home ratings to help you make the right choice.
A Place for Mom
We connect moms, dads, seniors and families like yours to the right senior care so you can save precious time and focus on what's most important. From finding the right nursing home, dementia care or assisted living facility to researching Veteran's benefits and financing senior care, we'll be with you each step of the way. All at no cost to you!
Caregiverlist
Caregiverlist’s Nursing Home Star-Ratings.
CareHome.co.uk
Directory of nursing and care homes in the United Kingdom.
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