My grandfather, Charles Faingold, was a vital, robust guy for most of his life. At different points during his young manhood in Minneapolis and Chicago he plied his trade as both a wrestler and an accountant. He lucked into a job with the U.S. Postal Service just before the Great Depression hit, managing to remain stably employed throughout that difficult era. Family lore has it that his notoriously short temper had played a part in getting him that job, as he had recently quit a longtime private sector position over perceived slights.
By age 90, naturally enough, “Papa Charlie” found his faculties in decline. Erratic behavior became harder for the family to ignore, and following a separation from his third wife, who was also deteriorating, he eventually moved from his longtime Chicago home to Springfield. Here he briefly resided with my parents, who were both working full time then. This arrangement lasted only a few months, coming to a head on the day he went out for a routine walk in the neighborhood, became disoriented, then hopelessly lost. When police offered assistance, he was unable to provide the address. His memory simply could not reliably access this information any longer.
At that time, the mid-1990s, the yellow pages and word-of-mouth testimony were the only resources available to my parents when they set out to find a facility that could help meet Papa Charlie’s increasing need for care. They settled on Montvale Estates and were happy with the decision, as my grandfather spent most of the rest of his days there. However, people looking for information about options for the care and housing of elderly family members now enjoy a much wider variety of available resources, thanks mainly to the Internet.
One of the most efficient websites dedicated to this purpose is provided by Medicare at www.medicare.gov/nursinghomecompare. The site functions something like a “store locator” on a retail platform, allowing users to provide their location either using city name or zip code. This information yields a list of potentially appropriate facilities, all of which are assigned “star ratings” in categories such as “Health Inspection,” “Staffing” and “Overall Quality.” Users can click on the name of a given facility, which then allows access to more specific information within each of the larger evaluation categories, including specific salient details such as number of beds and total number of licensed nurse staff hours per resident per day. The site also indicates whether a given facility accepts Medicare and/or Medicaid.
Another web resource is provided by AARP at https://caregiving.genworth.com. This tool seems somewhat more flexible than the Medicare page at the outset, as the finder allows you to narrow the choices to the specific kind of care being sought (assisted living, nursing home, hospice, etc). However, specific details are more scarce than on the Medicare site, as the AARP page relies on “Yelp”-style crowd-sourced reviews of each facility, with many entries indicating only whether or not the institution in question is licensed by the state. There are other websites and searches available and of course the yellow pages are also still published, for those who want to stick to “old school” methods.
Papa Charlie remained at Montvale for close to three years before he became sick enough to require around-the-clock care, at which point he was moved to the Regency nursing care residence on West Washington in Springfield, where he only lasted a few days before passing away. A lot of time has passed since then, and my own parents are now in the neighborhood of 70 years old. They are both active and relatively healthy, but I can’t help wondering how long it will be before I am faced with a similar task to the one they had before them with my grandfather. By that time, the Internet itself may be as antiquated as the phone book (that could happen next month, really). But it is good to know that there are user-friendly resources available to help with these important transitional choices.
Scott Faingold is a regular contributor to Illinois Times. Contact him at scottfaingold@gmail.com.
This article appears in Capital City Parent April 2013.
