This is the thirty-eighth in a series of articles intended to demystify retirement living options.

Previous articles mentioned that you can read your loved one’s medical chart and participate in care planning conferences. This article offers additional suggestions about how you might get – and keep -- yourself in the loop.

This is the thirty-seventh in a series of articles intended to demystify retirement living options.

Many people are involved in caring for your friend or relative in a nursing or skilled nursing facility (long-term care facility): doctors, nurses, aides, dieticians, activities staff, social workers, possibly physical and occupational therapists, perhaps companions who don’t perform medical services, and so forth.

How can you get attention to questions, concerns, or suggestions you have when a topic may involve several different departments?

This is the thirty-sixth in a series of articles intended to demystify retirement living options.

The last several articles in this series described some of the sorts of problems that can arise in even well-run assisted living or skilled nursing facilities. How can you tell if your friend or relative is subject to errors or oversights in care? A good first step is to read their medical chart. To do that, you need legal authorization.

This is the thirty-fifth in a series of articles intended to demystify retirement living options.

You may assume that your loved one is getting all the expected care in assisted living or nursing/skilled nursing. But sometimes, quirky problems disrupt the established routines in the facility, and care can suffer as a result.

This is the thirty-fourth in a series of articles intended to demystify retirement living options.

The previous article discussed how duplicate prescriptions might arise, overdosing your loved one who lives in assisted living or nursing/skilled nursing. This article discusses the opposite problem: how needed care may be omitted.

This is the thirty-third in a series of articles intended to demystify retirement living options.

Suppose that you have helped an elderly relative move into an assisted living apartment or into a room in a nursing or skilled nursing facility. Now you can breathe a big sigh of relief, knowing that they will be well taken care of, right?

Not so fast.

This is the thirty-second in a series of articles intended to demystify retirement living options.

The previous two weeks’ columns have discussed Senior Move Management, a process that helps people make the transition from a house they may have lived in for many years to a smaller home, typically an apartment in a retirement community.

What if you plan to stay in your home for a while longer, but sort of wish that you were moving, just so that you could start over without the accumulated weight of a lifetime of possessions?

This is the thirty-first in a series of articles intended to demystify retirement living options.

A quick quiz -- which of these would you prefer to do:
• Listen to fingernails on a chalkboard for hours and hours every day?
• Figure out how to downsize to move from your four-bedroom house to a one-bedroom apartment in a retirement community?

This is the thirtieth in a series of articles intended to demystify retirement living options.

Perhaps you are considering moving to a retirement community, but when you look at the house you’ve lived in for ten or twenty or forty years, you feel discouraged. You remember how hard it was to organize and pack everything the last time you moved – and that may have been decades ago.

This is the twenty-ninth in a series of articles intended to demystify retirement living options.

If you want to stay in your home but need help with some of the details – getting ready for the day in the mornings, running errands, and so forth – you may decide to engage an agency that provides in-home non-medical services.

But how do you know that a stranger in your home won’t take advantage of you?