The pull, named out loud
Three things follow from being paid at move in. An agency has a reason to move quickly rather than correctly. It has a reason to steer toward homes it has an agreement with. And it has no reason at all to tell you that your mother could manage another six months at home with a few hours of help.
Those are real pressures and pretending otherwise would be the tell. What matters is what a service does about them, and whether you can check.
What we do about it
We publish the whole field. Every licensed residential care home the state lists in this catchment is named on one page of this site, 336 of them across 12 towns, with bed counts and licence numbers. That includes homes we have no agreement with and have never placed a resident into. Hold our short list against that page and you can see precisely what was left out and ask us why.
We also say no out loud. If home care for a few months is the better answer, we say so and earn nothing. If the honest position is that Encino has 7 licensed homes and none of them suits, we say that too, and then we go and look at the 299 small homes and the larger communities across the 11 towns around us.
What a referral gets you that a directory does not
- A phone call to each home, made today, about whether there is a bed this month. No public list carries that and none ever will.
- The care level conversation had before you drive out, so nobody tells you at the door that they cannot take a two person transfer.
- A short list of three or four homes, not a directory of three hundred and a wish of luck.
- Somebody who has been inside the building and will tell you what the photographs leave out.
What happens after we hand you the short list
We book the tours, grouped so an afternoon covers two or three rather than one, and we tell you which questions to ask at each and why. If you want us there, we come. Plenty of families would rather go alone the first time and call us in the car afterwards, which is fine and often more honest.
If one of them fits, we help with the paperwork, the care assessment and the move in date, and we push back on anything in the agreement that should not be there. If none of them fits, we go again. There is no cap on that and no point at which we start hurrying you, because a placement that fails in month two is worse for us than one that takes an extra fortnight.
Then we call you about a month after the move, which is when the real picture appears. If it is not working, say so then rather than at six months. Early is fixable.
What to bring to the first call
The monthly budget as a number, not a range. Any diagnosis that is on paper. Whether she can transfer alone, with one person, or with two. Whether anyone needs to be awake overnight. The discharge date, if there is one, and which hospital.
That is enough for us to start calling. Everything else we can work out as we go, and we would rather have a short imperfect call today than a thorough one next week.
Written and reviewed by Senior Placement Encino, , against the California Department of Social Services licence register.