About Senior Care Record

Why this exists

My mother is in assisted living. My sister and I are still cleaning out her house.

She planned absolutely nothing. Not the money, not the place, not the timing. And when it became clear she could no longer manage her house — or be looked after by the person living in it with her — the work of fixing that landed on my sister, who moved into our mother’s house to do it.

What that job actually looked like: convince her she could no longer manage on her own, sort through a lifetime of belongings, get the long-term care insurance approved, and find somewhere she could still live independently but also receive supervised medication administration. Then pack her, move her, and set the new place up so it felt like hers.

None of that was fast. It took months, and my sister carried nearly all of it. When the move was finally done she stayed on to clean out the house and repair it. That was two years ago. It still isn’t finished.

The first ambush was the insurance. My mother had good long-term care coverage — the hard thing most people never get around to buying. But some time earlier she had lowered her payment, and the provision she gave up was the one that would have covered the money due up front. As far as I know, nobody ever walked her through what that would mean on the day it mattered. It meant personal loans, taken out by a woman about to move into assisted living. That’s the part nobody warns you about: not the monthly rate everyone quotes you, but the lump you have to produce before anyone opens a door — decided years in advance by someone with no way of knowing what she was trading away.

The second ambush was quieter. “Somewhere she can live independently but still get her medications administered” turns out to be a genuinely hard question to answer from the outside. Facility websites answer it with photographs. What we needed to know was whether there was a nurse.

Florida records that. And it turns out nearly three in ten licensed assisted living facilities in this state affirmatively report no nurse availability at all — in Miami-Dade, it’s 62%. That fact is public. It is nowhere a family in the middle of this would ever find it.

Once I saw that, I went looking at what else the state knows and doesn’t put in front of anyone. It’s a lot: license status, deficiencies by severity class, fines with case numbers, moratoriums that bar a facility from admitting new residents, and the former names a facility used to trade under.

I couldn’t fix the insurance decision. This one I could do something about.

What this site is

Senior Care Record is an independent directory of licensed assisted living and memory care in Florida, built on the state’s own licensure and enforcement records.

We list every licensed facility in the counties we cover, whether it pays us or not. That sentence is the whole product. A Place for Mom — the largest referral service in the country — is paid by facilities on placement, and the communities it shows you are the ones in its paid network. We started from the state’s licensure roster instead, which means the facility with a provisional license and no website is on this site with the same profile treatment as the big marketed campus down the road.

We’re publishing Miami-Dade and Broward first — 1,059 facilities — and expanding across Florida from there. The statewide record is already collected; pages go up county by county so each batch gets checked by a person before it’s published.

What’s in the record

Collected from Florida AHCA public records, as of August 9, 2026:

The 10,372 legal actions include sanctions, emergency actions, and changes of ownership — a change of ownership is administrative, not a black mark, and we label it that way everywhere it appears.

Three things we show that most directories don’t

License status, in plain language. A Florida license isn’t simply active or inactive. The state records seven distinct statuses, and that field does not appear on the state’s own public comparison tool at all — it lives one click deeper, on a page most families never reach. We put it on the profile.

Whether there is a nurse. Nearly three in ten Florida assisted living facilities — 894 of 3,017 — affirmatively report no nurse availability. In Miami-Dade it’s 62%. A further 196 have no record either way, which is a different thing and we show it differently. Many families assume assisted living includes nursing care. It often doesn’t, and it’s a question most people don’t know to ask.

Enforcement that isn’t a fine. A moratorium means the state has barred a facility from accepting new residents. Denials, revocations, and conditional licenses don’t show up as a dollar amount either. Where the state has recorded one, we publish it with its case number and a link to the source, so you don’t have to take our word for it.

How we make money

You should know how this site is funded before you trust a word on it.

Right now, we don’t. No facility has paid us anything — not for a referral, not for a listing. The site currently earns nothing.

If we ever accept a placement fee, it will be a flat amount, identical for every facility, never a percentage of your rent — and the number will be published before we take a dollar of it. The usual arrangement in this industry is a commission worth 50–100% of a resident’s first month’s rent, which means the more expensive the community you’re steered toward, the more the referrer makes. A flat fee removes that incentive entirely. That’s the reason for it.

Payment will never buy position. Ranking and default sort come from inspection records, enforcement history, and license status — public data, applied identically to everyone. A facility may someday pay for presentation: more photos, a longer description, a direct contact button. It will never pay to move up a list, to appear in a “best of,” or to be included at all, because everyone licensed is already included.

Bad news gets published about paying facilities too. Fines, violations, and moratoriums display the same way whether a facility pays us or not. That rule is written down now, while it’s cheap and hypothetical, precisely because it gets expensive later.

We won’t sell your contact information. When you reach out through this site, it comes to a person — right now, me. Nothing gets distributed to a list of communities who then call you for a month.

Full detail, including the fee schedule once one exists: How We Make Money.

What we can’t tell you

Being straight about the limits, because a site that makes claims about other businesses owes you the edges of those claims.

• We are not a substitute for touring in person. Records tell you what an inspector found on a given day. They cannot tell you whether the staff know your mother’s name.
• A clean record is not the same as a good facility. Smaller facilities generate fewer records, and raw counts track facility size as much as facility quality. Absence of findings is not evidence of excellence and we try hard never to present it as such.
• Old fines may belong to a previous owner. Roughly four in ten facilities have changed hands. Where enforcement predates the current ownership, we flag it as prior ownership rather than hanging it on the people running the place today.
• Some counts are five-year, not lifetime. The state publishes deficiency and complaint counts on a rolling five-year window. Fine totals we can compute for all years. We label which is which, because they don’t add up to each other.
• Where the state’s own designation is ambiguous, we don’t invent a label. One Florida license status has no published definition. Rather than turn it into a badge that a reader would misread as a warning, we leave it off.
• State data lags. Inspections and final orders post on the agency’s schedule, not ours. Every figure is dated. Our first quarterly refresh is due in November 2026.
• This is not medical, legal, or financial advice. Florida’s Long-Term Care Ombudsman Program is free, independent, and worth calling.

Who’s behind it

I’m Patrick Jenkins. I’m not a senior care professional, a placement agent, or a former facility operator. I’m a technologist who went through this with my own mother, went looking for the information that should have existed, and had the skills to go get it myself.

One thing I want to be straight about, because it would be easy to leave out. My mother is now in one of the nicest facilities money can buy. When my sister comes to pick her up, she says she’s glad to get out of there.

Better information does not buy anyone peace, and it will not make your parent glad to be where you put them. What it does is narrow the decision down to the things that are actually knowable — so that whatever you end up carrying afterward, it isn’t the suspicion that you missed something the state already knew.

Senior Care Record is independently owned and operated. It is not affiliated with any facility, chain, referral broker, or trade association, and takes no funding, ownership investment, or advertising from any of them.

If you’re in the middle of this right now — searching from a hospital hallway, a few days into a decision you didn’t get to prepare for — write to me at patrick@seniorcarerecord.com. It comes to me, and I’ll answer.

Source: Florida Agency for Health Care Administration, as of 9 August 2026.