Roanoke Nursing Homes Information

The two main categories of nursing care are short-term and long-term care.

Short-term care delivers rehabilitation services to patients that have been hospitalized for acute medical trauma like heart attacks, surgeries, falls, aneurisms and strokes. These patients are required to seek a short-term nursing stay if deemed necessary by their doctors. Short-term care tries to restore patients' functions and strength to a point where they can move to lower levels of care. Short-term care is an important bridge between hospital care and assisted living or in home care options. Under a short-term stay, patients are helped along a personalized path of recovery that often utilizes physical, occupational, speech or respiratory therapy. Registered nursing staff and doctors are present throughout the entirety of a patient’s recuperation process.

Hospital care is an essential component of the recovery process for many future short-term nursing patients. Quality care and doctors can give patients expert recommendations about area SNFs and can administer effective treatment during the initial days after a medical crisis. In Roanoke, the best health care services, based on patients’ prior hospital experiences, can be found at Carilion Roanoke Memorial Center.

Long-term care concentrates on attending to patients who are severely physically or mentally impaired by illnesses like dementia, multiple sclerosis, cancer, neurological diseases and general decline due to old age. Many long-term patients are under such care because the state of their condition had declined past a point there former type of care could reasonably treat. Long-term patients have complicated and elaborate health needs that demand a collective and cooperative effort from all members of a facility’s team of caregivers. Physicians and nurses respond 24 hours of the day to perform complex medical procedures like wound care, colostomies, tracheostomies, medication adjustments, blood testing and injections. Custodial care is administered by non-medical personnel. Social workers offer patients a certain level of companionship by playing games, eating dinner, talking and watching television with them.

Roanoke skilled nursing facilities have monthly costs that are higher than the national average. Semi-private SNF rooms cost as much as the Virginia median; $6,007 per month. Private SNF rooms cost $6,585 per month in the area, nearly $300 per month less than the state median.

Recently, there has been a large push by seniors and their families to pursue assisted living care in lieu of nursing care. This often stems from the sentiment that both sides do not see nursing care as necessary. However, quality nursing care is needed for patients with serious medical needs. They stand much to gain from the close care and large number of nursing professionals that skilled nursing care can provide. The fact that most frequent destination for assisted living patients is nursing care underlines the point that quality nursing care may be a better starting point for many of them. Although nursing homes have a negative connotation to many, proper, compassionate, committed care is offered at many facilities.

Our site wants to present seniors and their families with the information they need to find a nursing home that matches their emotional, financial and medical needs.