If you’re considering setting your loved one up in a nursing home or other type of care facility, it can be hard to know which one will be right for your family and who you can entrust to take the best care of your loved one.
While looking for a care facility, it is vital to ensure that it focuses on the treatment your loved ones need. In addition to trained and well-equipped staff, they might need a community that they can feel at home with. There are many ways to find a facility that fulfills these criteria. You can ask your close relatives and friends, or you can talk to healthcare professionals. Searching for “memory care near me“, can also give you a list of options, if you are looking for dementia care, for example. After selecting a list of options, the next step would be inspection. But how do you go about doing that?
Luckily, there are a few things you can do when trying to find the right facility that can help you feel more confident about your decision. To show you how, here are three tips for finding the right nursing home for your loved one.
Make A Physical Visit To The Facility
Arguably the best thing you can do before choosing a nursing home or care facility is to physically visit that location. Without going to the location and seeing what is actually happening there, you can’t have first-hand experience regarding how the facility is run. To get an even better idea of this, Wall Street Journal Guides recommends making multiple and random stops into the facility so you can see it during different times of the day and with different staff members. By popping in unannounced, there won’t be time for the facility to fake how they handle things or how the residents are treated.
Listen Well When Touring Facilities
Along with being aware of what you’re seeing when taking your facility tours, Cynthia Ramnarace, a contributor to AARP.org, suggests being keenly aware of what you can hear during your tour as well. While you might think that hearing residents moaning or yelling for assistance might be a bad sign, this isn’t necessarily an indication of poor treatment, especially for dementia patients. To prove if a facility is running professionally, Ramnarace states that you should listen to how staff members address residents. If they use their names rather than calling them “Mama” or “Grandpa”, this is usually a good sign.
Look For Adequate Staffing Numbers
One of the biggest indicators of whether or not your loved one will be able to get the care and attention he or she will need is based on the number of staff member the facility employs. To find this out, Kimberly Leonard, a contributor to U.S. News and World Report, recommends checking the facility’s staffing ratio. If the place seems great but your loved one isn’t able to get help in a timely manner, that facility may not be the right one for you.
Trusting the care of your loved one to someone else can be a very hard decision to make. This choice could have a massive impact on not only their life, but the lives of your other family members as well. To ensure you make the right one, use the tips mentioned above when considering a nursing home for your loved one.
