Do Your Retirement Home Research Due Diligence!
By Caroline Inman
IN the more than 11 years that Solva has been supporting seniors and families here in Ottawa, we’ve conservatively helped many hundreds of ladies and gentlemen find their new retirement home.
Our role is never to recommend any one building over another as we work with everyone and our opinion is entirely subjective. You don’t need that from an advisor – you need objective information and details, as well as resources, education and knowledge, so that you can make your own decisions and be comfortable with them. Our goal is to guide you, be a sounding board, share with you tips and strategies and offer impartial information that you may not know.
However, you can also do some due diligence of your own, which can support how you’re feeling/leaning towards a property either before or after you’ve visited.
The biggest consideration and something we advocate everyone does, is familiarize themselves with the
RHRA – this stands for the Retirement Homes Regulatory Authority and this is the provincial regulator for all licensed retirement homes. They have an active website where you can put the name or address of any residence in the province, and read fully factual information about that home. You can filter from various drop downs to see what care and services a home is licensed to provide, license status as well as read reports from inspectors who’ve conducted routine as well as mandatory inspections.
You can also check to see if any home has been issued with a Registrar Enforcement Order which means concerns were identified by the RHRA, but doesn’t mean the concerns weren’t resolved by the home.
Google Reviews – talking about subjectivity and objectivity, Google Reviews are opinion based and so may need to be taken with a grain of salt. However, so many of us use platforms like this to read what others think and have experienced and it’s certainly a good place to start. If you read posts that give you concern or pause for thought you can absolutely raise those concerns when you tour. You can ask the home what their policy is on a certain thing; you can ask them about staff training and what is mandated that they be schooled in. You can ask about care plans and what that will look like for your loved one. Even though the remit of a sales consultant is to sell you their building, they should still have all the information and answers to your questions, or bring in a subject matter expert, like the director of care or the general manager.
Google Searches – on the heels of reading reviews, do Google searches on the homes themselves. Some are really invested in social media so you can see photos and videos of all the activities that go on. You can also follow their Facebook or Instagram pages.
On the internet, you may come across articles that have been written about a home or company/group of residences. This info could be good or bad and maybe based on opinion or fact. Any news (not advertorial content) published by a newspaper or that’s been on a local television station should have been thoroughly sourced so there is credence to be given to that. Again, don’t be afraid to ask hard questions when you visit the home and see and hear how you’re responded to.
Which leads us on to our own Questions to Ask and Observations to Make guide that we’ve produced. It’s a comprehensive booklet which looks at everything from first impressions, lifestyle and costs, to accommodations, regulations, staff, security, care and much more. It’s a great tool, especially if you’re going to visit more than one home as there is space on each page to make notes, and you can refer back to them to make an apples-to-apples comparison.
Please email us at info@solvaseniorliving.ca or call us at 613-421-6073 and we can email you a copy.
Your overall decision is going to be a subjective one, in as much as how does a place make you feel. What we have seen over the years is those who do their due diligence, and objectively and factually research are always better prepared.
We welcome you to connect with us at any time to discuss your needs or those of your loved one, or to chat further on anything shared in this article.
613-421-6073 and info@solvaseniorliving.ca