Washington, DC – The National Center for Assisted Living (NCAL) recently unveiled a comprehensive set of Guiding Principles for assisted living communities, focusing on individual centered care as the foundation to develop and improve services.
"These principles establish a strong philosophical foundation for the myriad policy and operational issues facing the assisted living profession today and in the future." stated David Kyllo, executive director of NCAL. "Our intent is to provide a framework to help assisted living communities to provide assistance with physical activities and health-related needs, while also striving to meet the social, emotional, cultural, intellectual and spiritual needs of their residents."
As the assisted living profession continues to grow and change, NCAL developed these guiding principles to assist providers, residents, family members and staff in providing quality care and services and promote full disclosure of information to prospective family members and residents. NCAL's principles for providing information to consumers, focuses on the residents' right to be fully informed regarding fees, policies, and services, as well as ensuring that an assisted living community maintains consistent marketing and communication with their resident agreement and policies. NCAL also provides comprehensive guidelines on providing quality services and care in assisted living communities, focusing on the importance of creating and maintaining performance objectives, data collecting, benchmarking, measuring resident, family and staff satisfaction, and workforce development.
"NCAL views these Guiding Principles as a constructive resource to describe what assisted living is and to empower the assisted living profession to enhance services to meet or exceed residents, family, and staff expectations."
NCAL's "Guiding Principles" Resources can be found here:
The National Center for Assisted Living (NCAL) is the assisted living voice of the American Health Care Association (AHCA), the nation's largest organization representing long term care providers. For more information, please visit www.ncal.org.
The American Health Care Association and National Center for Assisted Living (NCAL) represent nearly 11,000 non-profit and proprietary facilities dedicated to continuous improvement in the delivery of professional and compassionate care provided daily by millions of caring employees to 1.5 million of our nation's frail, elderly and disabled citizens who live in nursing facilities, assisted living residences, subacute centers and homes for persons with mental retardation and developmental disabilities. For more information, please visit www.ahca.org or www.ncal.org.