Nursing Home Shopper

Welcome to Nursing Home Shopper, your one-stop-shop when searching for your next nursing home.

If you’re like everyone else looking for a nursing home, you’re trying to find a facility with an unsurpassed safety record where you know your loved one will be treated with love and respect while receiving premium care.

But you just don’t know where to start.

Nursing Home Shopper will simplify your search.

Our site uses a proprietary search algorithm that collects and analyzes the latest inspection information so you can easily identify which nursing homes have excelled in quality while helping you steer clear of those known for chronically underachieving.

But that’s not all.

If you become a Nursing Home Shopper subscriber, you will be granted access to exclusive search details that fine tunes your search so you can quickly pinpoint your next nursing home.

While we’re confident that Nursing Home Shopper makes your facility search a whole lot easier, know that our site should never be the sole determiner of choosing a facility. No nursing home search would be complete without taking time to actually visit the home first.

You probably wouldn’t buy a house without scheduling a home tour, the same can be said about selecting your next nursing home.

Go on a nursing home tour.

Go on multiple nursing home tours, if necessary, and make sure to plan some of those visits at night and over the weekend, as problems typically occur during these shifts. Here’s what to look for when visiting:

  • When you arrive, don’t be star struck by the lobby. Nursing homes invest a great deal of money in their lobbies to make them feel warm and inviting, but this can often be fool’s gold. Care happens beyond the administrator’s office. Don’t be afraid to walk around the facility and ask some tough questions.
  • Spend considerable time talking with families and residents without staff presence; they’ll give you an honest assessment of what life is really like in the facility.
  • Watch out for these red flags, they are frequent indicators of negligent or abusive care:
    • Not enough staff to promptly respond to resident calls for assistance o The facility smells of urine, feces, or chemicals
    • Food does not look or taste appetizing
    • Residents are left unattended for long periods of time
    • Residents appear disheveled or are wearing mismatched/stained clothes
    • Dead bugs or rodent droppings sprinkled throughout resident living areas
    • Furniture is in disrepair, floors are sticky
    • Staff are impolite or disrespectful
    • Staff fail to knock before entering residents’ rooms
    • Too few or no activities (check to see if current activities match what’s posted on the activity calendar)
    • No resident or family council

HELP...MY LOVED ONE NEEDS A NURSING HOME RIGHT NOW!

There are always those times that life doesn’t always go as planned. If the need for nursing home care is suddenly thrust upon you, send us a message through our GET HELP NOW portal and one of our advocacy specialists will get back to you within 24 hours. We will be happy to help.

Let Nursing Home Shopper help you avoid a nursing home placement misstep, become a subscriber today!

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Grading Methodology

Nursing Home Shopper relies on nursing home staffing and inspection data routinely collected and published monthly by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) [1]. Nursing home grades are comparatively determined using a quintile distribution of averaged enforcement and staffing data categorized within the following measures:

  • Health Safety
  • Building Safety
  • Direct Care Staffing Hours
  • Vocational Staffing Hours
  • Professional Nursing Hours

Enforcement Data

Health Safety and Building Safety scores are calculated using CMS’s Scope and Severity grid, a matrix that quantifies the seriousness of cited nursing home deficiencies.

Each nursing home’s inspection record is evaluated based on the frequency and severity of deficiencies. The fewer the deficiencies, the better the score. Whenever a facility is cited one or more severe deficiencies [2], its overall score is rated much lower.

Nursing Home Shopper also includes an evaluation of imposed nursing home sanctions that may have been incurred as a result of negligent care. In those instances when facilities are fined, Nursing Home Shopper assesses a graduated “fine penalty” to a facility’s total score. 

Staffing

Nursing home staffing is a critical determiner in a facility’s overall performance. Nursing Home Shopper extrapolates and averages professional nursing hours and direct caregiver hours per resident daily to rate a facility’s staffing commitment to residents.

How It Works

Nursing Home Shopper’s Enforcement and Staffing rankings are assigned grades [3]

(based on a quintile distribution of comparative in-state rankings of each measure) using the following formula: (Health Safety Score + Building Safety Score + Averaged Direct Care Staffing Hours + Averaged Vocational Hours + Averaged Professional Nursing Hours)

5 performance measures*

*A facility’s final score may reflect a graduated fine penalty if it has a history of imposed sanctions.

[1] The Government Accounting Office stressed that Nursing Home Compare data has some “limitations” as much of the data is self-reported by nursing homes (GAO-09-689, August 2009).

[2] Severe deficiencies – immediate jeopardy or actual harm violations that resulted in resident injury, abuse, neglect or death.

[3] Nursing Home Shopper scores and grades serve as a consumer starting point for consumers about a facility’s care and should not be used a final determiner of facility quality. Nursing Home Shopper encourages residents and families to look beyond the data by visiting nursing homes and asking facility staff and administrators about inspection histories, current staffing levels, and quality of care distinctions. Families should also make inquiries with state regulatory agencies and ombudsman offices when evaluating nursing home quality.