Five Tips for Choosing a Reliable Nursing Home
The news that eight Florida nursing home residents died in the aftermath of Hurricane Irma has prompted a criminal investigation and spurred widespread outrage.

Hospitals may have an incentive to save money by discharging patients, putting pressure on families to make a decision quickly, but consumers should know they can ask for more time. “I tell people this may be one of the most important decisions you ever make regarding this person’s life,” Mr. Chicotel said. “Don’t feel pressure to go to a place that you haven’t vetted.”

Do your homework.

Investigate the track record of the facilities you are considering. A federal website, Nursing Home Compare, is the most comprehensive source of data on nursing homes and allows consumers to sort and compare facilities based on geography and other factors. The site includes information about a home’s staffing levels, recent inspection reports and measurements of the quality of residents’ care. Another website, Nursing Home Inspect — run by ProPublica, the nonprofit investigative journalism group — allows visitors to dig more deeply into facilities’ inspection reports and any citations they have received from regulators.

The federal website is not perfect — some key information, like staffing data, is reported by the nursing homes themselves, for example — but changes in recent years have improved the site. Nursing Home Compare also does not always include state-level reports or penalties. To view those, families must search the websites of individual states, such as the one run by the state of Florida.

Taken as a whole, the websites can provide an overview of a nursing home’s quality and identify potential red flags. A facility that has been given only one or two stars on the federal website, for example, should likely be ruled out, advocates said.

Florida officials are still sorting out who is to blame for the death of residents this week when the facility’s air conditioning stopped working, but the nursing home in question — the Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills — had a federal rating of two stars (out of a possible five). Inspection reports show that in 2016 and 2014, it was cited for problems with maintaining its emergency generators, though this year, a follow-up inspection concluded that the issues had been corrected.