Two regulators, two completely separate lists
Residential care facilities for the elderly are licensed by the California Department of Social Services, and that is the register on our site. Skilled nursing facilities are licensed by the California Department of Public Health. Different department, different inspections, different list.
Assisted living and nursing home get used interchangeably in conversation and they are not interchangeable in law, in staffing or in what they are allowed to do for a resident. Check which one your family is actually being sent to. The paperwork will say, and it is worth reading the word rather than assuming it.
Short stay or long stay
There is a real difference between a rehabilitation stay after a hospital admission and a permanent move into long-term nursing care. Families are often told about the first while quietly planning for the second, or the reverse.
Ask the discharge planner three things: which of the two is being arranged, how long it is expected to run, and what happens at the end of it. Ask for the answer in writing if you can. Everything you decide afterwards depends on it, including whether you should be looking at our register at all.
Where Santa Monica families get discharged from
Providence Saint John's Health Center on Santa Monica Boulevard and UCLA Health Santa Monica Medical Center on Sixteenth Street are the two hospitals inside the city. The Westside also feeds into Ronald Reagan UCLA in Westwood and Cedars-Sinai further east.
Each runs its own discharge process and each hands out its own list of facilities. Take the list, but know what it is: places the hospital has contact details for. It is not a ranking and it has not been checked against the licence register for you.
Coming back out is where we start being useful
A rehabilitation stay usually ends in a decision, and the decision is usually about residential care rather than more nursing care. That is where our register earns its place: 15 licensed homes inside Santa Monica, 11 more across the Westside, with bed counts and licence numbers.
Read it while she is still in rehab. The families who struggle are the ones who start the week of discharge, and in a market this small a week is the difference between a choice and whatever is left.
What we can do and what we will not pretend to do
We are a placement service for residential care. We do not place people into skilled nursing and we are not going to claim otherwise to keep you on the phone.
What we can do is take the call while you are still in the hospital, tell you honestly whether the level of care you are describing belongs in a licensed home at all, and have a short list ready for the day rehab ends. If the answer is that she genuinely needs a nursing home, we will say so, and you will have lost nothing but one phone call.
Written and reviewed by Senior Placement Santa Monica, , against the California Department of Social Services licence register.