According to the American Health Care Association and the National Center for Assisted Living, there are almost 30,000 assisted living facilities in the U.S. providing people with senior care. This should make it fairly easy for you to find at least a few good senior care options in your area for a loved one.
But you do not want to make the mistake of simply Googling “senior care program” and choosing the first facility that appears. If you do this, you may not land on the best facility of the bunch.
Instead, you should take a different approach to choose a senior care option for a loved one. It’ll take a little more time and effort on your part to track it down. But you’ll feel more confident in a facility’s ability to care for your loved one when you take this approach.
Here is what you should do when you’re in the market for a senior living option for a family member.
See Which Assisted Living Facilities Exist in Your Area
First things first: When you need to find an assisted living facility for a loved one, you should start by casting a really wide net. You should Google “assisted living facilities near me” and see what you can find.
As we just alluded to, you don’t want to do this and then select the first assisted living facility you see. But you should go through this exercise and use it to generate a long list of local assisted living facilities.
By doing this, you’ll be able to get a much better sense of which options you’ll have for a loved one when it comes to senior care.
Poke Around on the Websites for Assisted Living Facilities
After you’ve compiled a list of local assisted living facilities, you should visit each of their websites and see what they have to offer. These websites should shed light on:
- How long an assisted living facility has been around
- What an assisted living facility looks like
- Which services an assisted living facility can set you up with
Check out this website for a great facility called Rowntree Gardens to see what we mean. It’ll provide you with so much useful information on what it brings to the table.
Read Online Reviews for Assisted Living Facilities
Almost all of the assisted living facilities that you look at online are going to appear to be very nice. They’ll obviously work to paint the best possible picture of themselves on their websites.
But which ones have the best reputations in your community? That’s a question that you can try and answer by reading through online reviews for assisted living facilities.
Make it your mission to read through as many of these reviews as you can so that you can see what others have had to say about assisted living facilities. You’ll want to narrow down your original list by only focusing on the facilities that have earned glowing reviews.
Take Tours of Assisted Living Facilities
Once you get to this point, you should have a general idea of which assisted living facilities would be the best option for your loved one. You can go ahead and schedule tours of the ones that seem like they would be worth your time.
During these tours, you should analyze each assisted living facility and check on things like:
- What do the rooms at these facilities look like
- How the staff at these facilities treats seniors
- Whether or not these facilities are as clean as they should be
After taking tours of assisted living facilities, you should be one step closer to choosing one for your loved one. It should begin to become apparent which families are truly the best ones.
Compare How Much Assisted Living Facilities Will Cost
One thing that you’ll need to consider at some point will be the cost associated with different assisted living facilities. It can be very expensive to send a loved one to live in an assisted living facility depending on which one you choose.
It’s why you should start comparing how much different assisted living facilities will cost as soon as you can. The last thing that you want to do is fall in love with a facility only to discover that it’s well out of your price range.
Do yourself a favor and avoid going to take tours of any assisted living facilities that you won’t be able to afford under any circumstances. Instead, focus all your time and attention on the facilities that will be well within your budget.
Ask Your Loved One Which Assisted Living Facilities They Like
At the end of the day, you aren’t going to be the one living in an assisted living facility. Your loved one will be the one who is at the facility all the time.
With this in mind, you should stay in constant communication with them when it comes to which facility they like the most. If you can make it happen financially, you should try to help them get a room in this facility so that you know they’ll be happy living in it.
Choose the Right Assisted Living Facility to Provide Senior Care
All assisted living facilities can provide senior care to some degree. But some will inevitably provide better care than others.
This is why you don’t want to just choose the first facility you come across and trust it to take care of your loved one. You should take each of the steps found here to make sure a facility is right for your loved one before sending them to live there.
Read through some of our other blog articles to get more advice on caring for an older family member.
