South Carolina Nursing Home Blog : South Carolina Nursing Home Lawyer & Attorney : Poliakoff & Associates Law Firm : Elderly Care, Senior Care

National Senior Citizen Law Center does a great job analyzing and sharing information about long term care facilities.  Recently, they did a study on nursing home admission agreements, along with an accompanying consumer guide. The link to the material is available here.   The study looks at unfair admission contracts that have arbitration clauses, personal guarantees, and other unfair trade practices.  Everyone who plans on researching options for their loved ones should get to know this website.
 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks
• Share Link

 IQ Nursing Homes in a recent press release announced that it is now offering a national database of nursing home and elder care facility deficiency and inspection rankings. Careful research is imperative to ensure that the nursing home to which you entrust your loved one’s care is reputable and safe. Whether you are currently researching nursing homes for yourself or a loved one, or you want to investigate the facility where a loved one is currently residing, this free resource will be useful and informative.

The data in these reports is obtained from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). CMS conducts nursing home inspections in order to determine whether facilities meet the minimum Medicare and Medicaid quality and performance standards. You can review the ratings for any one of the more than 25 deficiency types, such as mistreatment, resident rights, quality care, and building construction. Then, narrow your search by state, and finally, by each individual nursing home.

Nursing home abuse is a widespread problem that can result in serious injury, disease, and death for nursing home residents. The elderly are vulnerable to becoming victims of abuse, especially when physical or cognitive issues affect their ability to communicate the abuse they are suffering to others. Neglect, physical abuse, emotional abuse, and sexual abuse can occur when nursing homes are understaffed, caregivers are insufficiently trained, or nursing homes fail to properly screen employees prior to hiring them.

Visit http://www.iqnursinghomes.com/ to review the database of nursing home deficiency and inspection rankings. You can also find a national nursing home directory, up-to-date nursing home news, and information about signs of elder abuse and nursing home neglect on this site. IQ Nursing Homes offers a free nursing home abuse claim form, which will be reviewed by a qualified nursing home attorney within 36 hours. Nursing home employees who have witnessed neglect can report it anonymously.

About IQ Nursing Homes

IQ Nursing Homes has partnered with nursing home lawyers and nursing home negligence law firms throughout the country with the goal of putting a stop to the victimization of the elderly. By holding negligent staff members accountable for their actions and making it financially devastating for nursing homes to allow neglect to occur, this pattern of nursing home neglect can be put to an end.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks
• Share Link

USA Today newspapaers are running a special article about elderly care.

The articles are especially interesting because they could help give us some insight into the situations that families must deal with on a daily basis. These articles say that right now 48% of baby boomers are providing some care for their aging parents, and 8% have parents who have moved in with them, and this trend is growing.

If you click on the various links in the articles, they will take you to more articles which contain many interesting statistics. The comments made by readers at the bottom of the articles are also interesting.

The percentage of people over 75 in nursing homes fell from 9.6% in 1985 to 6.4% in 2004, according to the AARP Public Policy Institute.
The average annual cost for a semiprivate room in a nursing home is nearly $67,000, reports the MetLife Mature Market Institute reports. In parts of the country, it's much higher. Still, if a senior citizen exhausts all her assets, Medicaid will cover her nursing-home care.

Not so with other types of long-term care. Except in isolated instances, Medicaid doesn't cover assisted living or home-based health care. That means families often have to pay those costs. The average cost for an assisted-living facility was $35,616 a year in 2006, according to the MetLife Mature Market Institute. The average cost for a home health aide is $19 an hour.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks
• Share Link

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks
• Share Link