I’ve just finished reading Involved Family Is a Key to Receiving Good Care in Nursing Homes, a December 13, 2011 article in the Detroit Free Press. The report describes how a nursing home resident benefits enormously when family members drop in …
Continue ReadingOne fifth of Medicare nursing home patients with advanced Alzheimer’s or dementia were sent to hospitals for questionable reasons in their final months, often enduring tube feeding and intensive care.
Researchers suspect that it’s not a coincidence, since Medicare pays a nursing home about three times the normal daily rate when it takes patients back after brief hospitalizations. A group of researchers from Brown University, Harvard University and Dartmouth Medical School studied about 475,000 nursing home patients who had been transferred to hospitals. Among them, 19 percent were moved for questionable reasons.
Researchers suspect that it’s not a coincidence, s…
My dad, who had congestive heart failure, lived on the second floor of a garden apartment building that had no elevator. As the disease made him weaker, he could no long walk down the stairs. And for the last year of his life, he was trapped in his own apartment. An “outing” was a slow walk, and eventually, a wheelchair ride […]
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Sometimes acquaintances describe how a hospice program entered the lives of an aging parent during the last week or even in the last few days of life. My husband and I are aware of just how much hospice offered to our family during the four months b…
Continue ReadingIn a move that shocked many in the elder care community, California has ended funding for its adult day care program. The question now is what will happen to the nearly 5,000 others that operate throughout the country. California’s $169 million program serves about 35,000 low-income seniors and other adults with disabilities. The program will end in January when […]
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Congratulations to St. Mary’s d’Youville Pavilion in Lewistown, Maine, for completing the first major Milestone in The Path to Mastery™: The Art of Creating a Caring Community. This powerful new tool developed by The Eden Alternative® guides organizations through the process of transforming their culture by applying person-directed care practices. Through this approach, decisions and actions […]
Continue ReadingI eagerly await Parts 2 and 3 of the Abolishing the Old Age Asylum series from Bill Thomas. There’s a laundry list of reasons why the culture change movement has engaged only about 10% of all nursing homes in a … Continue reading →
Continue ReadingIf you have a family member in a nursing home or long term care facility and you don’t know what a long term care ombudsman is, you should definitely check out this post at The Consumer Boomer: A Long Term Care Ombudsman is, in the plainest definition, a representative to elderly folks in nursing homes […]
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