Joann Westbrook

Do You Know Where Your Parents Are?: an Insider's Guide to Choices and Options in Senior Health Care Joann Westbrook

Finally a guide to senior healthcare that is readable, comprehensive, user-friendly, authoritative, and current. In its content, format, andtimeliness, Do You Know Where Your Parents Are? surpasses anything else on the market and fills a void. For the first time a true insider, a healthcare facility administrator, offers distressed families who have read the headlines about institutional abuse and neglect, the crucial information they need to choose the best health care option for a loved one. In clear, no-nonsense prose with the use of easy-to-use removable checklists, JoAnn Westbrook draws from ten years experience to take a family step by step through the maze of modern health care options from aging in place at home to dementia care facilities. With 77 million Baby Boomers who have aging parents and are on the way to retirement themselves, the time for this unique guide is now. To demonstrate how to interpret one of the most important tools for assessing a facility-the complicated state survey rating system. Ms. Westbrook has included a chapter on how to decipher a state survey. This has become especially relevant since for the first time, the federal government began publishing the survey results in the press-but not an explanation of how to interpret the results. Having worked as an administrator in Assisted Living, Nursing Home, and Specialty Care facilities, she has first-hand knowledge of the key criteria for measuring the quality of a healthcare facility as well as the crucial indicators that a facility is substandard or declining in quality. She alsobrings an insider's experience of negotiating the bureaucratic healthcare maze from her tenure as a state regional director for a large healthcare conglomerate. While her sections on healthcare facilities evolved from her experience as an administrator, the sections on aging in place at home are based, in part, on her experience assisting both her parents to age in place at home.