Long-Term Care: Nursing Homes, Assisted Living, and Home Health Services on the Web

LongTermCareLiving.com offers how-to manuals about choosing, planning for, and paying for long-term care. You'll also learn how to write an "advance directive," which is broken down into living wills and a medical power of attorney. This allows you to dictate your wishes in the event you ever become unable to make decisions yourself.

Aging Parents and Elder Care helps you determine what type of care you or your loved one can afford, whether short-term or long-term, and discusses the payment options available for nursing home care, along with factors you should consider when choosing a facility. A checklist with an extensive list of questions you should ask when selecting a facility is also provided.

AARP The Magazine provides 10 tips about selecting a nursing home, as recommended by Karen Westerberg Reyes, a volunteer long-term care ombudsman. Learn what questions to ask nursing home administrators, what parts of the facility you should personally inspect, and what you should expect not to see in nursing homes, such as residents whose privacy or dignity is not respected.

AARP also has a three-page checklist to print out and take to each nursing home you visit. Questions include staff- to- patient ratios, residents’ activities, and whether the food served looks good.

Medicare.gov has an extensive searchable database of nursing homes that includes details on each facility, such as whether it participates in the Medicare and Medicaid programs, how long it has been certified, and its type of ownership (government, for-profit, non-profit). Search by city, county, state, or zip code to find a list of facilities near you. Click on two or more facilities and hit “Next Step” at the bottom of the page to learn how many residents each home has, and the total number of health and fire deficiencies. It seems this site can tell you almost everything you need to know about a particular nursing home.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has published a list of nursing homes in its Special Focus Facility initiative, which is designed to help centers fix serious problems. Nursing homes are often cited during the federal agency's frequent inspections. The facilities on this list, though, have a pattern of problems over a long time, more deficiencies than the average nursing home, or problems that are more serious.

LongTermCareLiving.com has a check list of what to look for in assisted living centers, including a “Final Checklist Prior to Signing the Service Contract” near the bottom of the page.

Eldercare.gov has an “Eldercare Locator,” which is a database of local senior organizations that can help you find assisted living facilities in your area.

Total Living Choices has a searchable database of centers throughout the country. Search by your payment method (not every center takes Medicare or Medicaid) and whether an Alzheimer’s care center is needed. The results generally consist of a facility name, address and contact number. This site requires you to register before receiving results but it only asks for your email address, date of birth, and gender.

New LifeStyles Online is a series of senior housing guides published around the country. Conduct a free search for assisted living centers by state or zip code. The results sometimes include a link to a facility site, if it’s available, or just a name, address and phone number. This site asks for but doesn’t require registration before viewing the results, and it contains narration for each page, which you might find helpful or annoying. If you find it the latter, mute your computer or use controls on the right side of the page.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Web site discusses the problem of residents falling in nursing homes, common causes of a fall, the severity of the injuries resulting from falls, and ways to prevent residents from becoming injured in a nursing home.

MemberoftheFamily.net has compiled a directory of approximately 16,000 Medicare/Medicaid-certified nursing homes in the United States. The site features a “Nursing Home Watch List” to help you be aware of nursing homes cited for safety violations or complaints in the past. The "Nursing Home Information & Registry" page provides government surveys of nursing homes, with color-coded categorization of the severity of violations and harm done to residents.

The Joint Commission allows you to submit complaints online about Joint Commission-accredited health care organizations. Read this page carefully to see whether the Commission can handle your complaint (payment disputes and billing issues are not addressed here), and learn how the Commission will handle your complaint if it is accepted.