While both residential board and care style assisted living facilities and large corporate assisted living need to be licensed and follow the same regulations, the actual style of living will be different. One is like living at home with 24-hour care while the other is like moving into an apartment with amenities and care.
Apartment Style Living vs Home Board and Care
There’s a couple of different kind of broad categories of assisted living.
So the broad term of assisted living actually has two different pillars:
- large apartment style living
- small board and care style.
The one thing to note is that both of them are licensed by the state exactly the same. So the 500 pages of rules and regulations that the large assisted livings need to use the small board and care need to use also.
Watch the video now! Prefer to read? Here’s the gist of what else senior placement experts, Todd and Kelley, spoke about in this video clip.
Large Assisted Living
So a large assisted living is apartment style living where somebody would have their own apartment with their own things around them, their own sofa, bed, decorations.
They would go down to do activities, and they would go down to the dining room for their meals.
Any type of care that is needed would come to them, so they might have somebody come in and help them with a shower or with medication monitoring and things of that nature.
Residential Assisted Living
The other pillar is called board and care. And I think it’s more appropriate to call it residential assisted living. A board and care makes it sound like you’re gonna drop mom or dad off somewhere. You know and you might not ever see them again!
But residential assisted living I think is more accurate. It is a small home like environment. So you can be driving through a neighborhood and not even really know that you’re driving by a licensed board and care or that residential assisted living.
It’s a small home like environment like you or I live in. There’s a living room, a kitchen, bedrooms, front yard, backyard, but it provides care.
So the differences are that you might have a shared room or a master room or a private room. There’s a living room where you would sit and have a movie night with pizza. But all of your care is done within the care home.
One other important detail or nuance of the residential care facility is the amount of residents that reside there. Kind of the sweet spot is six, so six residents in the care home, mostly a private room, sometimes the shared room. And then of course there’s caregivers on site 24 hours a day.
