Rehab Select Blog

Managed long term care is a movement, largely promoted through Medicaid and Medicare, toward a value-based, managed care approach to long term care for elderly and disabled adults. If you're an Alabama healthcare consumer who needs long term care, you probably have questions about how managed care may work for you. What options are available to you under a managed long term care system?

Long term care services is a term used to describe a range of health, personal care, and support services designed to meet the needs of people who struggle with self-care. This may be a temporary circumstance, caused by a short-term injury or illness, or a permanent situation, brought about by chronic illness, long-term disabilities, cognitive or neurological issues or the aging process.

Has long term care been suggested to meet your needs or those of a loved one? If so, you’re likely to have questions about this type of care. What is long term care? Why might it be right for your situation? What types of patients can benefit from this sort of care? Here, we’ll look into these questions to help you get a better idea of what long term care is all about and when it may be an appropriate care option.

Long term care is a range of services designed to meet the needs of people who are, either temporarily or permanently, unable to care for themselves on their own.

These services are designed to help these individuals live as safely and independently as possible and may be provided over a few weeks or months as people recover and rehabilitate from serious medical events, or on an ongoing basis for those who suffer from chronic and/or degenerative health conditions.

If you're in the process of choosing a long term care facility to meet your care needs or those of a loved one, there are lots of factors to consider as you evaluate and compare facilities in your area. Many people who are in the midst of this process wonder whether or not the size of a facility is one of those factors. What differences can they expect to find between large long term care facilities and smaller ones? How can those differences affect quality of care and/or quality of life?

Choosing a long term care facility, whether for yourself or a loved one, is a very big, important and complex decision. Choosing well is a process, one that will require quite an investment of time and effort. You will, of course, need to focus a great deal of that time and effort on researching the reputation of each facility you're considering in terms of quality of care, environment and cost, among other factors. However, once that is done and it's time to visit and interview each facility that makes it through the vetting process to your short list, there are 3 important questions to ask yourself as you make those visits in Alabama facilities.

While quality of care and quality of life are certainly the primary considerations in choosing a long term care facility for yourself or a loved one, there is no getting away from the fact that costs must also factor into that choice. Comparing costs from one facility to another can be a confusing process since services provided and financial arrangements concerning those services vary widely. So how can the average person make reasonably accurate cost comparisons?

Here are basic steps to take to get a true picture of the costs associated with each facility you're considering for your care needs.

If you're in need of skilled nursing care, you'll certainly want to choose a facility for that care that is equipped to be effective in meeting your health and wellness needs. So what do you need to know to make sure that is so? Here are 7 critical components of effective skilled nursing care that you should expect to be present in any facility you choose to entrust with your care.

There are many important factors that informed healthcare consumers investigate as they choose a skilled nursing facility for themselves or a loved one.

The standard list includes the overall quality of care, the comfort and atmosphere of the facility, inspection and survey reports, licensure details and staffing details – such as staff numbers, credentials and turnover rates. However, there is another very important factor that is often overlooked: Experience.

Here we'll get into what that means in this context and why it matters in terms of choosing top-quality skilled nursing care.

Choosing a skilled nursing facility to entrust with the care of yourself or a loved one is a very big deal, and doing it well means delving into a lot of details about each facility on your list of local options. Among the more important of these details are whether or not a facility has had more complaints or violations registered against it than the average facility, and whether or not those issues have been resolved appropriately. So what do you need to know about checking for complaints and violations?