Retirement Home: How to choose it?

Moving into a nursing home is an important, often painful decision because it affects emotional and financial issues. Before embarking on a research, often long and difficult, it is better to know what we are looking for.

Is it better to enter a nursing home when one is still in relatively good health, with perhaps a slight handicap or waiting to have reached the limits of independence? Each formula has its followers! In any case, it is better to establish from the start clear criteria of choice.

Staying at home or going to a retirement home?

It is up to everyone to ask what quality of life he/she wants. While home care is generally a priority, it is sometimes necessary to recognize that a dependent person is better cared for in a nursing home than at home. Especially as this solution does not rule out going back to spend few days or holidays with his children.

The important thing

It is essential to prepare, to take the time. If the initiative comes from the children, they should not jostle or pressure their parent. To leave his/her home, to leave behind those little things that made one’s life. We do not go to a retirement home as we go on vacation, even if we see a way to break up our loneliness, to be better helped, to be more secure in terms of medical care.

To envisage this possibility, sufficiently in advance, makes it possible to get used to the idea, to specify its choices. It is also true that, even if one does not want to say much anymore, waiting lists exist, especially for senior living homes whose reputation is excellent.

Know how to assess your health

This is one of the first criteria of choice. Old age is not a disease as such, but it imposes adaptation steps. In order to find the right home for retirement, it is important to evaluate your autonomy capital, or the evolution of a disability and, in this perspective, your attending physician can help you to take the decision.

The apprehension of the elderly is natural

What are we going to do with my furniture? Will my apartment, my house, be sold? How are the other residents? Who will take care of me? Will I get used to it, etc.? ? One cannot help thinking of the worst situations frequently.

However, after a certain period of adaptation in senior living communities, the majority will recognize that their quality of life has improved, some have become friends with other residents, others have found old acquaintances, and for many Life is more comfortable, cheerful than before. Some even say they have rejuvenated into a retirement home!

Retirement home: the choice of location

Proximity allows relatives to visit, as often as possible, the person concerned, who on his part may not wish to go too far from his former living environment.

Evaluate your budget

Knowing how much you can count allows you to make a realistic choice. A helping hand of the children is most often necessary.