Finding Appropriate Care for Your Parents

Sooner or later, you’ll realize that your parents are getting older and are quite probably in need of help in their lives. If you live nearby, this isn’t such a problem. But if you live several states away, as many people do, you may have difficulty in locating a reliable source of help for your particular situation.

There are a number of available resources on the Internet that may fill this gap. One is relatively new – it’s OurParents.com, a website that offers free access to information on more than 65,000 senior care providers in the USA. The findings are totally independent and unbiased; they include a classification of the type of service, ratings, and prices, wherever possible. The Care Options Advisor is a useful tool to get the visitor started among the maze of possibilities available.

Unfortunately the site (and the database) is new, so there are few if any ratings for the individual services listed. However, there are numerous articles on all the practical steps necessary in finding the best solution, so that you can make your own ratings fairly easily. If we hadn’t already decided what we want done as we enter our dotage, we’d be happy to have our children use the approach offered in OurParents.com.

There are other sites that provide a similar service. One is SeniorCare.com, which seems pretty comprehensive, but has a range of charges for individualized assistance, starting with a free basic package, and proceeding to ones that include background checks. And if you already know if you want a caregiver, or a nursing home, or assisted living, you can Google the particular term; just don’t be caught by a lot of flim-flam, without good references and/or a personal visit.