Written by: patrick on June 18, 2010 @ 1:01 am
Welcome back to the Assisted Living Placements Blog, or more probably, welcome for the first time to the Assisted Living Placements Blog. Our goal here is to provide a forum for education on assisted living. We work diligently to keep our readers informed on changes and important events in this fascinating and important subject.
If you have read some of our previous articles, you have learned that the foundation of a referral service wealth rests on its database. This means that the referral services that expend the most energy evaluating new facilities and re-evaluating old facilities are able to provide the most valuable service to seniors and their families. It is easy to see why this would be.
Think of it this way; if a realtor had only one type of house to sell, that would be fine, as long as he sold to only one type of person. But of course, because our realtor works with many different types of individuals and families, he is going to need many different types of homes to meet many different needs. Some need large, some need small, city, country; everyone is unique.
With seniors this phenomena is even more pronounced. Not only is each senior unique, but their care needs are unique as well. So a health “inventory” of assisted living homes means a referral agent has a greater chance of being able to find a vacancy to match the seniors many needs. As we discussed previously, this will cover eight categories of need; physical, emotional, mental, social, cognitive, spiritual, financial and geographical.
Now, as we all know, and as we have illustrated many times, many referral services do not evaluate communities at all. They simply add any community or home to their database that will sign a contract, or in other words, agree to pay a fee for clients. We have pointed out that this is actually worse than no help at all to their clients because many good homes will not work with companies that do not come to the property. You can be sure that their clients have no chance of finding these homes.
Then there are referral services that lazily just work with a few assisted living homes. This is certainly less costly, but it creates the square peg dilemma. This is where the agent will try to “sell” clients on an assisted living option that does not really match their needs. As we stated this is an inexpensive way to operate but it does not serve the clients.
Then there is, of course, the Assisted Living Placements way, which is, as you will agree, really, the only honorable way to operate. Fully one third of our operating cost and time is involved in new evaluations and on-going evaluations. We are constantly connecting with state licensing and checking the status of ALL licenses in our areas, and evaluating new facilities as they appear.
Equally important, we are spending resources re-evaluating the facilities that have already been approved. This insures that very little is happening in the communities and homes of which we are not aware. We are also digging deep to categorize individual facility’s specialties. This, then, we uses to help direct seniors to the best home for them. Anything less is simply not helping.
This is the reason we are able to stand, so confidently, behind the homes we recommend, unlike ANY other operation today. Read the fine print of any assisted living referral service and you will find that do not actually recommend the facilities they provide to families. How, then, is this a service? Well, simply put, it is not. Bluntly, it is a money making scheme with defense seniors at its foundation.
So we come to the end of this article, for I feel my blood pressure rising dangerously. This is a topic that never fails to anger me. If the truth on this subject was widely know, there would be very few assisted living referral services left. Someday, perhaps. We can always dream. Until next time, Kindest Regards.
Tags: Assisted Living, assisted living evaluation, assisted living homes, assisted living placement, Board & Care, dementia care, orange county assisted living, senior care
Catogories: Assisted Living Facility News, From the President, assisted living education