With the help of nursing homes ratings, it is possible to identify the best nursing home in the country. The simple truth is that nursing homes all across the country are inspected for their quality. Even so, these inspections cannot always show whether the facility has problems. A much better means of checking whether a particular facility is up to the mark or not requires checking the ratings that the facility was given.
In order to find out more about nursing homes ratings, you will need to visit the website of Medicare where it is easy to locate a particular nursing home. You can search for it by entering part or the entire name and you can also search for it by its zip code or city and even by county and state. You can search for one or up to three nursing homes at one time.
Each such facility is rated according to number of stars. This means that the facility can get between one star and five star ratings. These stars show how well the facility did when it was inspected by state officials. Trained official inspectors will conduct exhaustive inspections of the site and this is done about once each year on average.
The inspection throws up information regarding how well the patients are being taken care of and what the care process is as well as how staff and residents interact with each other. It also takes a close look at the environment at the site. All this data is collated and used in order to determine what rating the site should be given. Five stars means that the site is excellent while one star shows that it is not good enough.
The site is also rated on the basis of its quality. In this case, the site will itself collect information and will then report it on its own. Again, it can receive stars from one up to five. When rating the site, things such as level of staffing will be taken into account. However, since this information is reported by the facility, it should be taken with a pinch of salt.
It is also important to understand that it is not always a good idea to judge a facility solely on the basis of the ratings it got. It is also equally important to pay a personal visit to the facility to check it with ones own two eyes.
It is important to pick the best nursing home because you want to ensure that your near and dear ones are going to get the best quality of care. By reviewing the ratings that the facility has been given you can form an opinion regarding its standards.
It is also important to breakdown the ratings so that you can understand what each rating refer to. As a person that is responsible for admitting a near and dear one into the best nursing home, you must make sure that you are admitting them to the best facility. You must inspect the facility and also judge it by its ratings. If everything measures up, you can then go ahead and admit your near and dear one to the facility.
Additional information at: http://www.medicare.gov/nhcompare/include/datasection/questions/proximitysearch.asp?bhcp=1
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