Many Resources to Help Find the Right Nursing Home
One of life’s most difficult rites of passage is the decision to move into a nursing home. Whether for oneself or for a loved one, it can be a heart-wrenching transition. Finding a good nursing home that provides quality care and is affordable is a big part of making the right decision and having peace of mind about it.
In several previous blog posts, I have pointed to many good resources that are available online to help with the search for a suitable nursing home. I thought it would be helpful to list all of those resources in a single blog post:
• The Oklahoma Department of Health maintains a Directory of Oklahoma Licensed Long Term Care Facilities.
• The Oklahoma Health Care Authority maintains the Nursing Home Ratings directory. That directory lists and provides information about 285 long-term care facilities in Oklahoma. Here is more information about that resource.
• The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services maintains Nursing Home Compare, which provides “quality-of-care information” about more than 15,000 facilities nationwide. Here is my description of that resource.
• U.S. News and World Report publishes an annual ranking of the nation’s best nursing homes. The magazine is well-known for their annual ranking of colleges and universities. However, U.S. News also provides annual rankings in many other categories, including best hospitals, best vacations, best cars and trucks — and best nursing homes.
I explained how U.S. News determines its ranking in this earlier post. However, I failed to mention several additional articles that the magazine provides for free online, including:
- How to Choose a Nursing Home
- Questions We Asked on a Nursing Home Visit
- How to Cover The Cost
- 9 Warning Signs of Bad Care
• The federal government has also published “Your Guide to Choosing a Nursing Home” and the “Nursing Home Checklist,” both of which I describe here.
If you know about any other good resources that provide valuable information to help in selecting a nursing home, please tell us about them in the comments field.