In a typical year, about 3.2 million Americans will spend some time in a nursing home. They might be moving there permanently, or just spending time recovering there from a sickness or injury.
How do you tell the best from the rest? And how can you make informed
decisions when you are dealing with costs, emotions and loved ones?
U.S. News & World Report is famous for its detailed rankings of such things as colleges, universities and the best places to live. Now it has taken a look at nursing homes, and is presenting a ranked list of 15,000 of the country's nursing homes based on the data found on Nursing Home Compare, a federal website created by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Homes are ranked in three areas -- health inspections, nurse staffing and individual quality measures, and the scores from those areas are added. U.S. News added its own searchable database, created an honor roll of the very top homes (the 27 homes that received 5 stars in each of the areas), created consumer guides and tips, and promises to update the database quarterly.
You can search the database by name, region, state, zip code and/or quality. The best homes have the most stars; those with problems are marked with a red cautionary alert. Here's the main page:
http://health.usnews.com/sections/health/best-nursing-homes/index.html
And here's the current honor roll list:
http://health.usnews.com/articles/health/best-nursing-homes/2009/03/11/best-nursing-homes-honor-roll.html