Why can’t families easily compare the quality, staffing and safety of the place where they may spend $6,000, $8,000 or $10,000 a month?
In a recent Sixty and Me article about ownership of senior living communities, one reader was shocked that few if any regulations exist in assisted living.
“Wow, I did not know most of this information. Are there independent reviews done in a standard format for Assisted Living? Where are they published? If not, is there a spreadsheet available with all the critical factors listed, that we can use to perform the review ourselves?”
My answer – no. Not really. And that may be one of the biggest failures in the entire assisted-living system.
We have standardized ratings for hotels, restaurants, cars, colleges, hospitals and nursing homes to name a few.
Yet when a family is about to make a $70,000–$120,000-a-year decision involving an older person’s safety and quality of life, there is no universally accepted consumer report card.
Why can I compare hotels by cleanliness, service and customer reviews, but I can’t easily compare assisted-living communities by staffing, turnover, training, medication errors or regulatory violations?
The basic problem: Ass...