Help Your Clients Find a Nursing Home

William S. Friedlander (attorney, Ithaca, NY) recently published his article entitled Step by Step:  Help Your Clients Pick a Nursing Home, Am. Ass’n for Just. (July 2010).  An excerpt from the introduction is below:

Clearly, there’s more to nursing home evaluation than meets the cautious eye of a professional litigator, much less the worried eye of an elderly person or someone concerned about finding a home for a failing family member. So how do you turn your experience and knowledge into useful advice for your clients and their loved ones?

First, take stock of what you don’t know. You’re probably not a physician, a social worker, or a case manager. Your advice cannot fully address the person’s specific medical, psychosocial, or quality-of-life needs, and you need to be clear with your client (and yourself) about those limitations. You are also, most likely, not a financial planner or even an elder law specialist, so you are not in a position to “cost out” payment strategies or pursue alternative care options, although long-term care advocates urge the exploration of alternatives to nursing home care as a first step in the planning process.

What you can offer someone looking for a nursing home is a lawyer’s perspective on common financial, administrative, medical, and quality-of-life concerns that arise in nursing home care and some tools for evaluating how well a specific nursing home addresses them.