If your family has made the difficult but necessary decision to place a loved one in an assisted living facility, you will obviously want to find one that is more than capable of providing the level of care and facilities that you want to see.
It is best to tour a few different assisted living facilities so that you can make some worthwhile comparisons. It also helps to ensure that you ask some pertinent questions and check some key facts about the facilities available and services offered.
Here is a look at what you need to ask and check when you tour an assisted living facility.
Assessing your needs
When you are first starting to gather information and deciding to learn about Parc Provence for example, you also need to take the time to consider exactly what you are looking for in terms of care for your loved one.
It is important to evaluate and agree as to what level of care that you actually need to be offered.
Assisted living is definitely different to nursing home care, so if your loved one has some complex medical conditions that need ongoing attention or your family member has been diagnosed with dementia, you will need to assess the level of their needs and check whether the facilities match those needs.
Assisted living is often viewed as the better option, but you do need to check that you are not actually looking for nursing home facilities.
Visit more than once
Choosing the right assisted living facility is a big decision and not one to take lightly, so you should not be concerned about whether or not to visit a place you are interested in, multiple times.
It is generally a good idea to visit at different times of the day so that you get the chance to build a clear picture of what mealtimes are like, how consistent staff services are and whether the culture and the environment feel consistent.
Talk to current residents
Where possible, if can often be very helpful and instructive to talk to current residents so that you can get some genuine feedback that could prove to be very helpful for when you are making your final decision.
If you do get a chance to talk to a few of the residents, ask them what they think about the care and services, how attentive they feel the staff are, and whether there are any aspect of the facilities or service that they would like to change or needs to improve.
Talking to a few residents should help build up a decent picture, especially if the comments and feedback are consistent.
Ask about meals
You will want to be satisfied that your loved one has their food and general nutritional needs taken care of.
As well as inquiring whether there is the option of in-room meal programs as well as communal arrangements, you should think about asking for details of what meal programs are offered, whether special requests are catered for, and how varied the meal plans are.
Crunching the numbers
Although the comfort and welfare of your loved one is the primary consideration, you do have to consider the financial aspects of an assisted living facility.
Assisted living is not usually covered by Medicare, which means that you need to work out all the costs involved so that you know what costs you are likely to have now, and into the future.
There is likely to be a base price quoted to you, but you also need to dig deeper and find out about the cost for additional services and charges that are not included within the basic charge.
Laundry and housekeeping charges might be included for example, or they might be extra, so you need to run through a list of all the likely charges, so that you know exactly what the true cost of assisted living is likely to be.
Take your time with the paperwork
As you would expect, there are a lot of details to get through when it comes to the admissions agreement.
You should be prepared for this agreement to be relatively lengthy and full of specific detail. It is therefore definitely a good idea to take your time reading through the paperwork thoroughly
If there are any clauses or terms that you don’t understand or maybe don’t agree with, you need to raise your concerns before proceeding, as there is the risk that if you sign, the small print might show that you have waived certain rights.
It is fair to say that admissions agreements often need to be lengthy in order to protect both sides and cover all aspect of care and the facilities. It is also why you need to take your time to make sure you are happy with the details.
Amelia Allan writes about eldercare, using her own experiences with her Mom to write her articles. She hopes that her experiences will help others going through the same situation.
I really like the advice about visiting the assisted living facility multiple times at different times of the day. After all, you want to make sure that if you leave your loved one there that they’ll be taken well care of 24 hours a day. For example you might visit once in the morning and once at night just to get an idea of what their waking up an