Editorial guides
Practical articles, checklists and explanations built around Italian nursing homes, urgent placement, waiting lists and home-care decisions.
Featured guide
In most cases it is not a stranger on the phone — it is someone close. The signs, the mistake to avoid when you raise it, and the steps that actually stop the money leaving.
Usually she is not sleeping because of how the day is organized, not because of a sleep disorder. What to ask about her actual night, and the federal rules on unnecessary drugs, dose reduction and as-needed orders.
Overgrown nails change how she walks, and how she walks is why she falls. Medicare excludes routine foot care — but the exception for diabetes and neuropathy is broad, and most families never claim it. Six questions.
Untreated hearing loss looks like dementia and makes it worse. In a nursing home the hearing aid ends up in the drawer with a dead battery. What Medicare will and will not pay for, and six questions to ask this week.
With dementia, people often lose the language they learned second and keep the one they were raised in. When staff cannot understand her, confusion gets recorded as agitation. What federal rules require, and six questions to ask.
Federal rules are unusually specific about a resident's money: separate accounts, interest, quarterly statements, and a warning before her balance costs her Medicaid. What to ask, and the signs of financial exploitation.
Federal rules put a number on how warm a nursing home is allowed to be, and require a plan for keeping it there when the power fails. What to ask, which medications raise the risk, and why the generator question matters more than the thermostat.
Federal rules do not merely encourage vaccination in nursing homes — they require the facility to offer it, educate, and document every refusal. What that means in practice, which vaccines Medicare covers where, and six questions to ask.
Families are told "our physician covers this building" and assume that settles it. It does not. What federal rules actually require: choosing the attending physician, how often visits must happen, and the notification rule worth memorizing.
Federal rules require the facility to protect residents' property from loss and theft — clothing included. It looks like the smallest problem there is, and it is one of the clearest signals about how the building is run.
Most read
In most cases it is not a stranger on the phone — it is someone close. The signs, the mistake to avoid when you raise it, and the steps that actually stop the money leaving.
From two time zones away you cannot tour ten facilities or drop in daily. The local network to build before the crisis, the documents to hold, and how to use the visits you do make.
Almost nobody moves into a nursing home by decision — they move after a fall. The changes in order of effect, what Medicare and Medicaid actually pay for, and the signs home is no longer enough.
Clothes that survive an industrial laundry, the paperwork that actually matters, and the one page about her life that is worth more than everything else. Plus the classic first-day mistakes.
