A "Tripadvisor" for the retirement home?

Compare retirement and nursing homes and homecare offers like hotels? At least that is what the website www.orahou.com promises. Since the beginning of 2019, more than 1500 retirement and nursing homes are listed there. The portal is designed like a hotel booking platform: photos of the homes, prices - and stars. And it is precisely these - namely the ratings - that do not meet with universal approval. In 2019, the two large umbrella organisations for retirement and nursing homes, Curaviva and senesuisse, wrote to their members advising them not to participate in this or similar rating platforms.

Contribution against old-age poverty?

Helvetic Care AG is the company behind orahou.com. This company aims to bring more transparency to the care of the elderly. A particular thorn in the company's side are the sometimes striking differences in costs that are not covered by health insurance. This applies, for example, to pension and care fees. These costs, which are not linked to care, can turn out to be quite high - with the consequence that those affected could end up in poverty in old age in the foreseeable future. That's why Helvetic Care AG also offers advice at orahou.com on how to organise your retirement financially. Getting an overview of what a stay in an old people's home ultimately costs is sometimes not easy. In a 2018 analysis of the retirement and nursing home landscape, the price supervisor already denounced intransparency, inconsistency and confusion in the tax rates. It accused the homes of using these rates to make excessive profits and to inadmissibly subsidise loss-making care.

What is evaluated?

Bringing transparency to the cost structures of retirement and nursing homes is certainly a laudable approach. But can platforms like orahou.com achieve this? Criticism has been levelled at this platform's rating system, the criteria of which Curaviva considers to be "hardly surpassable in terms of banality", as was stated in an article in the Luzerner Zeitung. For example, location, public transport connections, internal services, room facilities or shopping facilities are evaluated. There are further sub-criteria for all these points. The operators of orahou.com emphasise that this is purely a location rating, and that the quality of care and support is not assessed. The ratings are carried out by competent experts from Helvetic Care AG.

The website welches-pflegeheim. ch takes a different approach. The rating there is similar to a hotel rating platform: via an online form, ratings for care or location can be submitted there - in each case using a scale of 1 to 10. Here, however, the question arises even more as to how objective such ratings can be at all. For while guests of a hotel can certainly draw comparisons with other hotels they have visited in the past, this is only possible with difficulty for residents of an old people's home, as one usually only stays there once. Added to this is the fact that admission to a retirement home is often "emergency".

Subjective or objective?

But how can the quality of old people's and nursing homes be measured and assessed? As a rule, retirement and nursing homes are subject to cantonal health laws, each with different quality assurance requirements. This alone makes standardized comparisons and assessments difficult. The fact that Internet comparison portals are now beginning to award stars to retirement and nursing homes may well be in the interests of customers. Because often enough, objectified evaluation criteria and standards are diametrically opposed to a subjective overall impression. And a little pressure from the "consumer side" can certainly set in motion long overdue improvement processes - and reveal weaknesses in the system.