SARASOTA, Fla., January 9, 2004 (PRIMEZONE) -- With 77 million baby boomers, many of whom have aging parents, the country seems to be in dire need of quality health care. JoAnn Westbrook presents her new book, Do You Know Where Your Parents Are? An Insider's Guide to Choices and Options in Senior Health Care (now available through 1stBooks), and offers a complete guide to help people choose the best situation for their loved one.
Westbrook offers a readable, comprehensive, user-friendly, authoritative and current guide, not a sanitized, clinical handbook. Do You Know Where Your Parents Are? draws from the author's 10 years of experience in various facets of senior health care to provide a step-by-step guide for families through the maze of modern health care options. She even demonstrates how to interpret one of the most important tools for assessing a facility: the complicated state survey-rating system. Westbrook devotes an entire chapter to deciphering the state survey.
Do Know Where Your Parents Are? gives the reader the benefit of Westbrook's experience, having worked in assisted living, nursing homes and specialty care facilities. She informs readers of the key criteria for measuring the quality of a health care facility and the crucial indicators that a facility is substandard or declining in quality. Her insider's experience of negotiating the bureaucratic health care maze is taken from her tenure as a state regional director, but her sections on aging in place at home are largely based on assisting her own parents in the aging process.
Do You Know Where Your Parents Are? is a comprehensive guide that will assist anyone unsure of the proper care for seniors in their lives and help them make the right choice for their loved ones to live out their golden years in comfort.
"My journey into health care began when my mother was diagnosed with bone cancer and my family and I were compelled to work our way through a maze of health care dilemmas. I was in college at the time and the gravity of my reality at home pulled me toward a degree in gerontology," Westbrook says.
Westbrook later went on to become a licensed nursing home administrator, working nursing homes, assisted living, specialty care for dementia, continuing care retirement communities and independent campuses. She has designed and developed a special care unit within a nursing home, writing the programs, policies and procedures to coincide with state guidelines. She has also acted as designated trainer for teaching administrators nationwide for a large corporate entity. Do You Know Where Your Parents Are? is her first book.
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