Jonesboro Nursing Homes Information

While nursing care offers numerous services and plans, they are all contained in the two most general forms, short-term and long-term care. Certain institutions are also equipped to offer specialized care for patients with specific health concerns.

Short-term care looks to help patients rehabilitate from acute medical trauma like surgeries, strokes, falls, aneurisms and heart attacks. About three of every four short-term patients were required to pursue nursing care by their doctor while in hospital care. Short-term care's main objective is to be the intermediate stage of a patient’s recovery process. Once patients have recuperated to a certain point, discharge planners help patients find a less inclusive care option. To restore patients’ functioning to pre-trauma levels, nursing personnel often have patients undergo occupational, physical, respiratory or speech therapy. Frequently, patients move to assisted living or in home care after finishing a short-term stay.

Since hospital care precedes many short-term nursing stays, it helps set an important base for the rest of a patient’s rehabilitation process. Quality hospital care can affect how long a patient needs to spend in short-term care. High quality health care services in Jonesboro, based on patients’ previous hospital experiences, are delivered by St. Bernard’s Medical Center and NEA Baptist Memorial Hospital.

Long-term care admits patients who have extended and extensive needs. These patients have diagnoses and illnesses, like cancer, multiple sclerosis, kidney disease, hypothyroidism, dementia and Alzheimer’s, which are often in a deteriorating state. In order to stabilize, maintain or improve the health of these patients, nursing professionals must respond to quickly changing conditions and collaborate with each other to provide the proper and requisite services and supplies. Nurses and doctors evaluate and observe patients through periodic to continuous health management and perform medical procedures like medication adjustments, blood testing, wound care, dialysis, tracheostomies and injections. Non-medical personnel assist patients who cannot complete activities of daily living by themselves. Social workers and recreational planners coordinate nursing facility social services like dinners, events, games and outings.

Jonesboro skilled nursing facility residency bears a monthly cost that is well under the national average and about $200 less than the Arkansas median level. Private and semi-private SNF accommodations cost $4,747 and $4,238 per month, respectively.

About 50 percent of all nursing home residents must use private funds to pay for the cost of nursing care. This places a considerable strain on seniors and families who may be able to pay for a short stint but cannot afford prolonged nursing care stays. These patients are usually not eligible for Medicare or Medicaid and have not taken the precaution of buying or cannot afford the high cost of long-term care insurance. They are left with resorting to measures like breaking open their savings or retirement funds or selling off or borrowing against their assets. For patients who have medical needs that require long periods of nursing care, they are sometimes driven into eligibility for Medicaid because their private means of financing care have been spent.