As you start to look at prospective nursing homes, their costs, and their quality of care, you need to understand that they fall into three distinctive groups. The home you choose and the foundational group which it falls under can greatly decide what type of care you or your loved one receives.

Homes run by corporates, also known as For-Profit homes. This is where caregiving is a business and labor, such as for nurses, nursing assistants, orderlies, and cooks. And like any cost they have to be managed to maintain profitability. Each home or property owned by a corporation gets judged by the upper management on its profitability, productivity, and efficiency. Some facts to understand about corporate facilities include the following:

• They had the lowest staffing levels.
• They had the highest level of deficiencies identified by public regulatory agencies.
• They had the highest number of deficiencies, causing harm or jeopardy to residents.

The second category of facilities is those run by the medical sector. The residents in these facilities are judged by the main metric of body counts, which really translates into medical charts and a combination of symptoms.

These can also be referred to as a skilled nursing facility (SNF) or a nursing care center. In these facilities, patients are categorized and provided with specialized care based on their medical needs, conditions, and symptoms documented in their medical charts. This approach ensures that each patient receives appropriate and targeted medical attention, rehabilitation therapies, and other necessary services tailored to their specific health requirements. This categorization helps nursing homes effectively manage and address the diverse healthcare needs of their residents.

You might wonder how a skilled nursing facility differs from a nursing home.

Skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) and nursing homes might seem similar, but there is a significant distinction between the two. SNFs offer specialized care that requires skilled specialists with advanced training and certifications. In contrast, nursing homes provide more generalized care that may not require the same level of specialized certification. While nursing homes can employ staff with certain skills and certifications for general ongoing care and medical monitoring, they are often less equipped to handle acute illness recovery or rehabilitation following hospitalization compared to SNFs.

SNFs provide services like physical rehabilitation, cardiac care, pulmonary rehab, post-stroke recovery, wound care, and speech therapy, which are typically not available in nursing homes. Both settings offer similar services, such as assistance with daily activities, medication management, blood sugar testing, and insulin injections. The key difference is that nursing homes provide these services within the resident's full-time living environment. In contrast, SNFs provide them in a more focused, medically intensive, and short-term setting.

The third category of facilities is those run by (or primarily funded by) the government. Whereas we spoke about For-Profit homes earlier in this article, these would be classified as Not-For-Profit. These are the homes that survive on funding from programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid and are especially concerned with abiding by those guidelines so that their funding stays intact. A comparison of over 50 studies across the United States comparing Not-For-Profit homes versus For-Profit homes found that the Not-For-Profit homes excelled in the following measures of quality:

• More or higher quality staffing
• The prevalence of pressure ulcers is lower.
• The use of restraints is less frequent.
• Fewer government-cited deficiencies.

NOTE: Subscribers to Safe Secure Seniors have the ability to search for various facility listings and see the facility's profit status along with any violations that have been incurred by the facility recently.