San Jose Nursing Homes

A nursing home provides full-time care and medical treatment to seniors that cannot live independently or receive proper care with less inclusive services. While there is a stigma to nursing home care, there are many choices one can make to ensure quality treatment. Our site wants to help seniors and their loved ones understand the many facets of skilled nursing facilities and their types of care. Ultimately, through our site’s information, we want seniors to be able to access the nursing facility that intersects with their preference of location, cost and care.

San Jose nursing homes offer the two general types of care, short-term and long-term care. The most common medical events that land people in a nursing home are heart attacks, strokes, falls and aneurisms. Recovery is at the core of short-term care. These patients will receive rehabilitation services that help them to shortly resume their previous lives. Some that still feel they need less full-scale care opt to move to assisted living facilities. Long-term care is for residents that have debilitating mental or physical illnesses and cannot take care of themselves. Nursing home personnel, including nurses, physicians and non-medical staff help to make long-term patients’ lives as comfortable as possible. They take care of regular medical procedures like blood work and testing and activities of daily living like eating and bathing. Long-term patients that see a downturn their medical condition may have seek hospice or end of life care.

The majority of nursing home stays are caused by acute medical issues that lead to a hospitalization. Once discharged from the hospital, patients who need further treatment are required by their doctor to seek nursing home care. Since care for their issues starts at their area hospitals, it is necessary for seniors to get the best treatment at top quality hospitals. The most recommended San Jose area hospital, based on patients’ experiences, surveyed in the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems, is Kaiser Foundation Hospital-Santa Clara.

San Jose skilled nursing facilities are expensive relative to other parts of the country and the California state median levels. However, they do have a wealth of options and facilities with different specialties. San Jose semi-private and private nursing home rooms cost $7,832 and $9,155 per month, respectively. For those paying for nursing care through Medicare insurance, the program only covers 100 days of care in a single benefit period.

For families and their loved ones, looking into nursing home care is often a significant event in their lives. The decision is made worse because many do not think of nursing home care until it is absolutely necessary. There are a multitude of problems that these stresses put on patients and their caregivers. The level of care is a large problem. Long-term seniors depend on the staff for all their problems. They sometimes cannot communicate well, which may lead to insufficient care. Other times, seniors who become very ill can be disoriented or confused, which forces medical staff to restraint the patients for their own protection. This procedure may be used too frequently. Another problem is that senior residents believe they are not in bad enough condition to warrant being in a nursing home and are unhappy being there. This can give caregivers difficulty in properly treating them. Although many of these problems are existent, it is also important to remember that many institutions help senior patients recover, rehabilitate and thrive.