Everything You Need to Know About Nursing Homes: The Family's Comprehensive Guide to Either Working with the Institution or Finding Care Alternatives

As a caregiver to her mother for 16 years, the author, a professional writer, offers an exhaustive and authoritative work on institutionalizing a loved one and the alternatives to it. This book is based on the author's vast personal experience of spending unusually long hours daily at three nursing homes with her bedridden, comatose mother for nearly four and one-half years, until she took her back home for the final eight months of her life. The book also deals with the advantages and disadvantages of care alternatives, such as caring for a bedridden or ambulatory person at home by oneself; the hiring of home help; adult day care; assisted living facilities; residential care facilties; foster homes; and hospice.

This book is authoritative because in her 16 years of caregiving, the author saw her mother through various stages of her illnesses, from a miraculous brain cancer recovery to an ironic head injury accident that led her mother into a coma and institutionalization. The author, a relentless healthcare advocate, writes in a compassionate and realistic way with amazing anecdotes that humanize her experiences at every stage of her mother's illnesses. In addition, there are helpful checklists on selecting nursing homes and care alternatives, and sample letters to use in dealing with nursing home staff and all healthcare professionals. This book is recommended as a resource by the National Nursing Home Survey; Kentucky Initiative for Quality Nursing Home Standards; American Parkinson's Disease Association Iowa Information and Referral Center; and Texas Aging Network. Veteran's Today publication calls it: a complete, definitive instruction manual. Elder Home Finders praises it as: a truly definitive consumer's guide with special features, including checklists for elder care and housing options, enhanced with appendices and bibliography. It is recommended by Retirement Resources Guide.com, and further, Ultimate Health Guide.com calls it: an exhaustive and authoritative work. All Business, a Dun and Bradstreet Company, recommends it as a resource. As for libraries throughout the U.S., among others, these recommend it as a resource: the Pauline Hass Public Library in Wisconsin, the Pasadena Public Library in California, the City of Evanston Public Library in Illinois, the Burlington Public Library in Massachusetts, and the Downers Grove Public Library in Illinois. The Bellevue University Library recommends it as: a significant book.