She is on Medicaid. Both time she has made it to the top of the list at a different home. The home she is in makes it sound like she is horrible. Stuff they never discuss with us until we try to move her. The new home turns her away. She has Alzheimer’s. She is wheel chair bound and they keep her pretty doped up. They recently let us move her to another home owned by them. Which turned out to be worse than their other home. She is so far from family. It’s an hour and a half one way. What can we do?
Do they have Grandma’s behavior documented on paper? They can’t just say that she’s a problem and not document it. If she attacks someone or is attacked by someone, it has to be documented and reported. Ask to see the paperwork on what she’s done to cause other facilities to deny her. Ask any of the other facilities you’ve applied to what documents they saw from Grandma’s facility now that caused them to deny her admission. Hearsay isn’t good enough. You need to see the paperwork.
Someone from your family needs to take some time off and go to Grandma’s facility. Who did the original tour to place her there? Wasn’t it noticed back then that the place was so awful? Why was she placed there? Was it a hurry-up kind of thing? There’s a good chance nothing will get solved unless someone from her family puts in a personal appearance.
As we’ve said, you need to go to Grandma’s facility personally. Go calmly and with a firm idea of the information you need. Do not make unfounded accusations that you can’t back up with documentation. And, don’t accept any information from them that they can’t back up with documents of their own. Facilities run on paperwork and red tape. As DeeAnna said, keep us updated.
Go to Medicare’s Nursing Home Compare website and look up the nursing homes that your Grandmother has been in and also look for a list of other nursing homes close to where you live.
www.medicare.gov/nursinghomecompare/search.html?
The Nursing Home Compare has detailed information about every Medicare- and Medicaid- certified nursing home in the country. The information does not tell you all that you need to know but you can find out whether the nursing home had some problems that were severe enough to warrant a warning by the state and federal government.
Since your grandmother has Alzheimer’s, then she most likely needs to be in a Memory Care Unit. Look for nursing homes that have this type of nursing units. There are two types: locked and monitored (the door to the unit is unlocked but the resident or their wheelchair wears a monitoring device {WanderGuard} that activates an alarm or causes the door to the Memory Care Unit to close if the resident gets too close to the door.
Let us know how your search for a new nursing home is going. God Bless.
Having said that, there are excellent reasons *not* to move a person with Alzheimer's Disease unless you absolutely have to. Changes in their environment can upset them a lot, and that can have knock-on effects on their physical wellbeing too.
If the standards of the NH are as bad as you describe, and they do sound bad no matter how many allowances one tries to make, then consider using your state's formal complaints procedure. And yes, visit a lot more.
I wouldn't spend a lot of time going over previous attempts to break her out. It's history, it's gone. Better to focus on where you go from here: whether that's working with the current NH on improving her care and her condition, or starting from scratch to find a better facility and working *closely* with them to get her moved.
Michigan has a Faith Community Nurse or Parish Nurse organization (which is connected with local churches and synagogues) that is very active. Maybe you could contact a Parish Nurse near your Grandmother's nursing home and ask her/him for suggestions. Someone who can put their eyes on the situation. Google "Parish Nurse - Michigan" and see what happens.
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