Independent, Assisted Living, Nursing Homes and Memory Care Facilities

Originally I planned on Blogging 4-12 time a month. At first Wordpress was great. Then I upgraded my hosting to Coldfusion 8 which requires SQL 5. I need the extra features to help with my advanced search feature (which is very cool). Now my Wordpress is unstable. It gets a CGI error (The specified CGI application misbehaved by not returning a complete set of HTTP headers). randomly on posts since I use “smart” Permalink structure. I have reinstalled, and spent days trying to make Wordpress work on a windows machine and still have not got a solution. So if you are wondering why I don’t blog more about assisted living and senior issues, it is because I stand a good chance of losing the page anyway. If anyone knows how to make Wordpress work with Permalinks on a windows machine, please comment. Until then, There may be very little new information on this blog.

In some cases, seniors and new technology do not mix. Although businesses are continuously developing great new technology to help improve people’s lives, most devices are just too complex to really simplify your life. Take for example the recent purchase of a GPS for Grandma. Because of some recent memory loss, Grandma began to get lost more frequently when she left her small neighborhood. It seemed like a good solution to buy a GPS for her car. The concept of having a device that would make sure that she could never get lost seem like a really good one.

We purchased the Garmin device, installed in her car and began to train her. It quickly became evident that the GPS had too many features and options to actually simplify navigation. I started out by setting up specific destination points and saving them in memory so that she could just access one of them and then the GPS would tell her where to go. Then I tried to explain how she could recall a new destination. The first problem was that the process of re-calling a destination point was not always the same. Depending on the status when the car was turned off the menu options are different. In case A, it took six selections to reprogram a new destination and in case B, it took seven selections. As I tried to explain this new “simple device”, I realize we needed a sheet of paper to document the process of selecting a new destination point. What a waste.

That wasn’t the only drawback. Although I only live about 2 miles away, I noticed her, one day, down the street walking into a neighbor’s house. I went down and asked her what she was doing. She said that the GPS told her that was my house.

The third and most significant option is that finding a new destination point that is not preprogrammed can take over 20 key entries and would take longer then asking for directions. I really don’t think she could do it in an emergency situation.

The fourth problem appeared one day the GPS stopped working. It turned out that it does come unplugged from the cigarette lighter. The GPS just gave an error that the battery was low and did not tell her to plug the GPS back in. This made it very obvious that the GPS has very little benefit for someone who is not technically inclined with strong troubleshooting skills. If you are considering buying a GPS for a Senior who has difficulty with a DVD player or microwave or TV, the GPS is an even more complicated device and could actually be a disadvantage for some seniors. The GPS can actually be a distraction because there is more clutter in the car and more things to keep track of while driving.

So if you are considering a GPS for yourself or to help a senior get around their local area, you might want to quiz yourself/them on the usage of some of their other high-tech labor saving devices. If you/they ever have any problems finding a TV program that you/they want to watch then a GPS will only make life more complicated and you will waste 300 to 600 dollars.

One of the big advantages of assisted and/or independent living is the social interaction between peers. Even though my father does not like to socialize with “old people”, he has made a new friend at the assisted living facility and they are in LOVE. They look like a couple of teenage kids starring at each other across the table. Unfortunately my dad’s new girlfriend has Alzheimer’s. so she may have to move to a memory care facility if she gets much worst. At this point she is in assisted living because she is not at risk of “wandering off”, she just needs help with here daily living including medication. Together, the two are so happy that my dad agreed to stay in the facility as long as his girlfriend is there. He still holds on some fantasies about getting in the car and driving back to his house (which no longer is livable due to neglect and negligence) . I was a pleasant surprise that we agreed that the facility was a good place to be and that he would stay. Now we just need to get some of his financial problems resolved and life will be good.

This week, my wife suggested a companion book to go with this website. Although I originally dismissed the idea, I think it is worth going through the process of compiling information for caregivers and that could eventually lead to a book. Already my wife and I have had to deal with several difficult issues and we are still early on in the process helping our parents with their retirement. Here are some of the issues we have already had to deal with:

• Financial requirements for retirement and special care
• Transportation (giving up the car)
• Emotional support and Emotional changes
• Daily safety issues
• Estate planning
• Socialization and activity
• Loss of a loved one
• Dealing with stubborn seniors

These are just some of the issues that I would like to address on this website and possibly in a book. My goal is to combine my personal experience with research to compile a list of options for dealing with these types of situations. Every senior is different and every situation is unique so it is important to have a variety of options to consider. Many of these situations are extremely difficult because of the rigidity of the parent or loved one. I am also opening up this site and requesting feedback and suggestions for subject matter and for creative ways to solve senior problems. If you are a caregiver please feel free to comment on this blog and write about any related subject and how you managed to minimize or resolve the problem. With the upcoming explosion of baby boomers entering into their retirements, your input could help a lot of other people.

Welcome to the Assisted Senior Living Blog. This blog was created so my wife and I can share and hopefully help other “kids” that are dealing with aging parents. We are also inviting other to share their experiences. This help is especially important if you are struggling with a older family member that is losing or lost some their mental ability but they don’t know it yet. In my case, dad is extremely stubborn. This in conjunction with the fact that he is not really in touch with the real world makes everyday things (that we take for granted) difficult. Housing, transportation and maintaining a stable financial picture are all difficult tasks. As we go thought the learning process about our family, we hope we can share this information with you. We have also done a lot or research on housing for seniors and would like to share that information.

In many cases, parent do not plan for a sudden event like a stroke or heart attach. When these things happen, the family is left to quickly find an independent living, assisted living, or nursing home in just a few days. We hope to compile a list of all the options for each of these facilities and then allow current or previous residents to review the staff, amenities, food, and treatment. When we recently went through the process, this information would have been priceless. I think we got lucky in our selection of an assisted living facility but that still remains to be seen.

We also want to add feature to the site to help both seniors and their families deal with transitions. If anyone has a suggestion on how to make this site more useful, please as a comment to one of the posts or use the contact us form. This site will be a long term project and we hope that it will be valuable to many people.

When my dad was born, his mother and father told him what to do but he rarely ever did it. He might agree to do something but then quickly get distracted as soon as the subject changed or he spotted something interesting. Luckily his parent knew he was a kid and they did not expect him to be able to stay focused a task. The expectation was low and so the consequences were minor. Most parent just keep helping their children until they are able to be responsible for themselves.

Now, it’s eighty years and many drinks later. Dad established his credibility as a responsible person for many years and managed his finances is an acceptable way. As he aged, he slowly lost his sharp edge. Even before the stroke, he started making questionable judgment calls like only paying bills from people that he liked. But now that irrational streak has expanded and he judgment is scary. Like many seniors, they slowly slip to the point of being legally incompetent but there are usually many years before this point where they are on the boarder. This is the crisis period for many families. The aging adult can’t take care of them self but they refuse to get the help they need. There are basically 4 strategies for dealing with the period.

• Play hard ball and tell the parents what is best for them just like when they were kids. If they won’t do it, do it for them.
• Be nice and reinforce the issue. This can take weeks or even years of saying the same thing over and over every day. This is an option only for less important issues.
• Wait and see what happens. Most unbalanced situations eventually crumble to some kind of conclusion but picking up the pieces can be more difficult than the solving the problem before the fall.
• Throw your hands in the air and say “if that is what they really want then they can have it”.

I have used all four options with my father including the fourth. I usually calm down eventually and chose another option. The first option is usually the best option if your heart is in the right place. In many cases, my relationship with my father was not strong enough that he would allow me to take control and make it happen. I use option two plenty and would guess that ti worked about 20% of the time. I used a combination of options two and three in one case. The result was my step-mother died from over drinking. I did say “I told you so” and tried to use this unfortunate event to force him to make some other decisions to avoid have the some thing happen to himself.

My advice for other people is don’t use option four. and try to avoid option three. If you consider them like a child, you just have to do your best to help them and not let it get you down. Have the same patience that you would have with a baby or child. When ever possible, use options one and two. It may be painful but in the end, you will glad you gave your parents your best effort.

I just finished reading “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” by Robert Kiyosaki and thought that this is an appropriate subject for anyone thinking about assisted living, aging and retirement. First, I will say that the book has tons of clichés and is mostly a rehashing of other “get rich quick” books. It does however have several real gems of wisdom. I have read lots of business books, investment books and other wealth building books so I was pleasantly surprised to find 2 critical point that have been widely overlooked financial literature. These 2 factors are so key that everyone should understand them but few people including many accountant that make a living advising businesses don’t fully grasp. I will save you some time reading the book by reviewing them here.

Assets versus Liabilities

Every time you spend your money, you can choose to buy an asset or a liability. Most everybody chooses to buy liabilities. The mass marketers work hard to make you want liabilities. Cars, big screen TVs, boats, and anything from the Sharper Image store is a liability. . You spend your money to get it, then you spend more to maintain it and it never produces any financial benefit. You can’t sell these items for anywhere near what you paid for them so they have little if any asset value.

In fact, for many people, their home is a more of a liability than asset. People are constantly piling more money (that could be invested) into their homes with upgrades. Since they will always need a place to live and the upgrades spoil them, they can never sell their home to recoup this investment.

The more liabilities you own, the less likely you are to be able retire comfortably. People that retire comfortably lead a simple life with a less than average number of liabilities. If you want to lead a good life-style when you retire, buy more assets and fewer liabilities.

Passive Income

The rich get richer because they focus on building their passive income and not their salary. Retirement plans are a thing of the past so building your salary income usually does not help you get closer to a great retirement. For most people, a salary increase is immediately follow by standard of living increase that offset the salary increase and puts more pressure on the worker to keep producing so they can maintain their new standard of living. You get a pay raise and you buy a new car that puts you even deeper in debt.

The rich focus on Passive income, not pay raises. Passive income continues to produce revenues even if you are sick, laid off or just playing lot of golf.

If you focus on paying-off your high interest debt and then investing in passive income producing assets like rental properties, web sites, and dividend stock, eventually you can live off you passive income and you are set for retirement. This might happen a 50 or might happen at 72 but the sooner you start, the better. If you want to have a comfortable retirement, start building your passive income now!

That my interpretation of the secret behind the book: “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”. Don’t let the mass marketing culture steal your retirement by tricking you into spending every penny on junk (money sucking liabilities). Think like the rich and buy passive-income producing assets and someday you will be independent of your paycheck and ready for a fantastic retirement.

When it comes to finding an assisted living facility, Ohio is the bomb. In the development of this site, I am trying to compile a complete list of licensed assisted living facilities and I am also gathering reference information like Ombudsman phone numbers and where to get inspection reports and complaints. As I have been gathering this information, I found the Ohio Long Term Care website (www.ltcohio.org) and was blown away. They are years ahead of most other states and decades ahead of states like Indiana. Currently, assisted living facilities in Indiana do not require a license if they are not dispensing medicine. This sounds like anyone can set up an assisted living facility in their basement, as long as they aren’t dispensing medicine.

Ohio, on the other hand, not only requires licensing but has an amazing website where they post information about complaints and inspection reports. In addition to that the Ohio government conducts annual surveys of assisted facility residents. Tabulates the data and posts it on their website. This allows users to easily select facilities based on the reviews of current and previous residents. Even before I started this site, this was one of my goals. To help disseminate that information, I will be writing administrative reviews based on the reviews conducted by the Ohio Long Term Care group. I also hope to have the same level of quality information for every state in the United States (even Indiana) and Canada. In other words, Ohio is a role model for a standardized system that should be implemented in every single state. I’m sure that many states have limited budgets and are not able to provide this level of service to seniors but it is critical to have safe housing for seniors that need special help . For this reason, Assistedseniorliving.net will try be the next best thing. Please try checking our directory to see the current status on tabulating reviews and other critical information about assisted living facilities across the United States. With an estimated 40,000 assisted living facilities in the US alone, this task will take years to complete but hopefully we can get some volunteers to help with that task.

When a senior checks into a hospital, the staff there is extremely well-trained to treat the obvious ailments. In some cases though they might miss a problem that is not so obvious. Since they have no history with the patient, the staff may not know about the existing mental condition of the senior. This was the case for my father. Although my father was always a little bit crazy. He’s always been a very rational man. After his stroke and release from the hospital, everything started out fine. Then my father started acting totally crazy. He pulled out his catheter which is equivalent to having a baby with no painkillers. After that he just kept saying that he would have gotten away with it if there had not have been so much blood. He continued to call me by my sister’s name and talk about how much he wanted to go for a drive. When we checked him back into the hospital, he was mostly fined during the day and at night he attacked an orderly and tried to get in a car and drive home. He turned into a kind of caveman whose single focus was to drive home. Since the hospital had no history on his mental status, they must assume that he was just like that. Because a family member was there, we knew that there was another problem. We continue to tell them that this is not normal and after three days of insanity, they finally ran a test to find that he had an infection. After talking to several doctors and nurses, we found that this was a very common problem with senior.

Seniors deal differently with infections. I’ve heard it from several different sources since then that when a older adult gets an infection, it can cause temporary insanity. Most of these infections can be easily treated with antibiotics. The big problem here is that it takes a family member or expert staff to realize that there is an unseen problem that should be tested and medicated. The results of my father’s tests originally came back with the extremely mild elevated white blood count. Still this was enough to make him a psycho fruitcake for about three days. If you are the son or daughter of an aging parent, keep in mind that there is no one better to review and assist in the medical care of family member. I can’t stress this enough. Everyone needs someone not associated with the facility to guarantee the best healthcare. I just hope that when I’m older that I’m still close enough to my son and daughter that they will be able to check on me and make sure that the facility is doing everything right.

Here is a list of the worst of the worse nursing homes across the country according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. These facilities are listed by region.

East Coast

If you have family in Florida at the Key West Convalescent Center, the Palms Rehabilitation and Nursing Center in Lauderdale Lakes or the Apollo Health & Rehab Center in St. Petersburg, you may want to move them to a new location. The are 3 homes in Georgia that should be avoided. The Place at Augusta, Shoreham at Marietta and Laurel Baye Healthcare of Lake Lanier in Buford have been sited. In Massachusetts, both Milton Health Care and Cedar Hill Health Care Center in Randolph.are poorly rated. Pennsylvania had 2 homes on the list: The Brighten at Broomall and Ashton Hall Nursing and Rehab. In Connecticut, the worst rated nursing home is the Wethersfield Health Care Center. Washington DC had only one care facility on the warning list. It was the Carolyn Boone Lewis Health Care Center. The Woodley Manor Health & Rehabilitation in Montgomery and the Eastview Health Care Center in Birmingham are the worst 2 nursing homes in Alabama. In Mississippi, keep your eyes on Evergreen Missoula Health & Rehab and the Hinds County Nursing & Rehabilitation Center. The facility in question in Virginia is Ruxton Health of Woodbridge. There were 2 facilities in Louisiana (Plaquemine Caring and the Lake Providence Subacute Rehab). The Overton Park Health Care Center in Memphis, Tennessee is on the bad list. In New York, the Vivian Teal Howard Rehab Center is in question. If you have family in Magnolia Manor or Ridgeview Manor Nursing Facility in Hopkins South Carolina, you may want to move them to another facility.

Mid West and Central Region

Both the Aberdeen Healthcare Center and the Bennett County Hospital and Nursing Home, in Martin are the worst places in South Dakota. The Taylor Care Center is named Texas’s worst nursing home. The Blair House in Burlington, Iowa, the Gooding Rehab & Living Center in Idaho and the Benson’s Nursing Home Inc. in Nashville, Arkansas are the respective worsted facilities for these states. Keep your eyes on the Berkshire Nursing & Rehab Center in Forest Park, Illinois and the Hillcrest Centre for Health and Rehabilitation in Jeffersonville, Indiana. The Atchison Senior Village and Ottawa Retirement Village should also be avoided. Both the Northwest Nursing Center in Oklahoma City and Pawhuska Nursing Home were rated the worst two nursing home in Oklahoma. The Luther Home and Willows Nursing and Rehabilitation are the 2 Wisconsin facilities with the worst track record. Missouri is one of the worst states with 3 different homes in question. The St Elizabeth Healthcare and Rehabilitation Center in Florissant, the Senior Estates in Kansas City and West Village Manor in Columbia are all poorly rated facilities.

West Coast

There were 2 nursing homes found to have significant problems in Colorado. The Kindred Healthcare & Rehab Center of Northglenn and the Eagle Ridge at Grand Valley are on the “avoid” list. In Washington State, the Evergreen Centralia Health & Rehab, Frontier Rehab & Extended Care in Longview and the Franklin Hills Health & Rehab in Spokane are best to stay away from until they resolve their management problems. California has only one facility on the list and that was the Yuba City Care Center. You wouldn’t think that you would see these kind of problem in Hawaii but the Leahi Hospital, in Honolulu made the bad facility list. As you move inland to Nevada, you will find problems at the Fort Bayard Medical Center, and the Evergreen Mountainview Health in Carson.

If you have family in any of these facilities, there may not be a problem but you should be aware that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Service has put these facilities on their watch list. I recommend that you talk to your loved one and if you see any evidence of a problem, move them to a higher-rated facility. If you speak with the residents of these facilities, a majority of them will probably have positive things to say. This list was generated because the facilities have a history of health violations.  These violating may only effect a small portion of the residents but there is no point taking chances if you have other options.