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Tips for Finding Assisted Living Communities

October 18, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Recall that assisted living communities offer your loved one a place to live where they can receive basic assistance, while retaining a measure of their privacy and independence. This assistance could be housekeeping, meal preparation, 24-7 monitoring, shower assistance, toileting, medication assistance or reminders; transportation and help with eating, or dressing. The amenities of assisted living should also include interesting and engaging activities, as well as opportunities for social activity.

Assisted living communities vary in size. In a small assisted living community, you will have 16 or fewer apartments/rooms (much like a residential home). In a large community, you will have over 17 apartments/rooms and up to over 100 apartments/rooms.

You can locate local assisted living communities through a number of means. I’ve found both the Medicare tool and several public web sites will cast a wide net for you to start your search

Medicare’s Long-Term Care Planning Tool

The Internet is playing a growing role in caregiving and healthcare. One such tool worth mentioning here is Medicare’s Long-Term Care Planning Tool. The stated goals of Medicare’s Long-Term Care Planning tool are to help you understand:

  • What long-term care services are available
  • How much you can expect to pay for long-term care
  • What financing options are available to support your long-term care costs

This tool will ask between twelve and twenty questions and will then provide you with the long-term care results you need by comparing your answers to those of individuals with similar profiles.

For those that want a quick snapshot of communities, the tool only requires a few questions. However, if you have specific care needs, financial constraints or care needs, the tool enables you to indicate those requirements.

While the results of this online tool are general in nature, and certainly not intended to replace comprehensive financial and other long-term personal planning, they will give you important insights.

An initial recommendation can be provided from only a few basic questions. By answering optional questions, the user can further narrow the list of recommendations. Here’s a tip: be sure to check out the Resources tab while you’re on the site. There’s a wealth of links to various government programs and agencies

Other Ways to Search

In addition to the Medicare online tool just mentioned, I’ve got some tips to get you started on choosing the right assisted living community for your loved one. First, you’ll want to know all of the options in the area in which you are interested. To get a full list of the communities near you, you can:

  • Visit or call your local senior center
  • Use Google to find the listings for assisted living in your area or zip code
  • Get a list from a local hospital or skilled nursing community
  • Or Go “old-school” and look in the Yellow Pages

Assisted living communities aren’t always easy to find, and many are nestled in between neighborhoods. While there are many sites on the Internet that list assisted living options on a regional basis, such as the ones listed above, the three that I found most useful are noted below. They’re good places to take a broad view of what’s available. Write down the ones closest to you. As you work your way through the process,  you’ll want to narrow this down to a short-list to choose from.

My favorites:

Snap For Seniors
Snap for Senior is a great resource for senior care communities and has the largest database of senior resources in the country.  I’ve met the co-founders Derek Preston and Eve Stern and they are fantastic people with a high-degree of integrity.  I would start my search there.

Senior Housing Net
Senior Housing Net is a fee community located from Move.com. Through this site, you can find local assisted living communities as well as prepared for your loved one’s move.

ElderCarelink
ElderCarelink is an internet-based referral service–free to consumers–that specializes in eldercare case matching for elders and their families. ElderCarelink assists families in finding a multitude of services, including assisted living, nursing homes, adult day care, private duty nursing, care management and homecare.

Stay tuned for part two of this blog post next week with more tips and suggestions on finding assisted living communities.

Photo Credit: maureen lunn

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where can an alzheimers patient reside when they have aggressive behavior and he has spells of hitting caretakers

October 16, 2011 By Leave a Comment

My father is basically the nicest guy but about once a month he gets stubborn and hits his caretakers. He has been dismissed from 3 nursing homes in the area for hitting. He has been baker acted and is currently at a mental facility to adjust his medication. Between hospitals for a UTI and rehab nursing homes he has been in 7 different places in 6 weeks. He can return to assisted living only if he has 24 hr private aid. That costs around 400 per day, who can afford that? What are caretakers supposed to do with an aggresive patient? I know with alzheimers this is not unusual but people treat you like it is. I do not know what to do. I am trying to get him qualified for medicare. If I put him in another nursing home this will probably happen again. Thanks for any advise you have!

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3 Common Signs of Functional Decline

October 5, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Everyone changes physically and mentally with age, but there are some changes that can really put a loved one’s safety at risk.  If you think that a loved one may require a transition to assisted living or elderly care, then you must first assess whether they are undergoing a true functional decline.

Functional decline is sometimes difficult to diagnose as individual symptoms often go unnoticed. Below is a list of symptoms of functional decline to be familiar with.

  • Misusing medication (over or under use and deviating from a schedule)
  • Reports of inexplicable behavior from friends, neighbors or family members
  • Poor personal hygiene
  • Unpaid bills
  • Changes in spending patterns
  • inappropriate clothing
  • Stains on clothing or upholstery from urine or feces
  • Forgetting how to use simple tools
  • Poorly cared-for pets
  • Repetitive questioning
  • Difficulty in communicating
  • Confusion
  • Unfinished tasks and chores
  • Spoiled or poorly-prepared food

Studies have documented that functional decline, i.e., the loss of either complex or basic ADL functions is due to changes in one or more of six areas: physical, perceptual, cognitive, visual and hearing, falling and psychological.  Below I will describe the first three areas in more detail and I will discuss the latter three areas in the next blog post.

1. Physical Changes

It’s obvious to anyone: as the human body ages it loses physical strength, stamina, muscle coordination, and balance. Those of us who had aging grandparents or aunts and uncles saw firsthand how the natural aging process affected their abilities to perform commonplace tasks.

2. Perceptual Changes

Here we’re considering all the senses: vision, hearing, sensitivity to touch, taste – even smell. After all, each is important to overall well-being. If you can’t smell smoke, you may lose your life to a house fire; if your sense of touch is diminished by poor circulation, you may be burned by scalding water.

Many medications are responsible for changes in taste perception. When this happens, it’s easier to eat spoiled food, or even choose not to eat at all, as food no longer tastes like it used to. I have noticed that after older people are less able to use the telephone with ease. Warning alarms and buzzers may go unnoticed.

3.  Cognitive Changes

While our thinking may remain clear, the speed at which a human can process information slows considerably as we age. It’s not just the speed at which we perform tasks. It’s also our ability to multitask. Our ability to divide our attention fades as we age.

Those changes are within the range of normal and expected changes; but what of the complications of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease? With dementia and Alzheimer’s loss of memory, language processing skills and inability to solve problems greatly affects your loved one’s level of independence.

Look for these warning signs:

  • Disorientation, fright or confusion when faced with a change of location, such as a doctor’s visit, visiting friends or family, or eating out at a local restaurant.
  • Giving incorrect or evasive answers when asked simple questions. For example, “What day is it?” gets the response, “What, don’t you know?”
  • Aggressive behavior or noticeable personality changes.
  • An inability to concentrate on television programs, tasks or conversations.
  • A gradual (or sudden) loss of memory.
  • Disinterest in routine tasks, such as cooking or housekeeping.
  • A decline in social skills, such as successfully engaging in conversation, or eating a meal with the correct utensil.
  • A decline in judgment skills, or inability to recognize consequences. This could manifest itself in leaving the water running, not shutting off the stove, or leaving the front door unlocked.

There are three more areas to monitor in order to determine whether a loved one is experiencing a real functional decline: hearing and vision loss, frequent falling and negative psychological changes. In the next blog post we’ll discuss symptoms within these three areas and how these problems can lead to a functional decline and loss of independence in aging individuals.

Photo Credit: Flickr user e-MagineArt.com.

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