Title: How a Nursing Home Works
Author: Peter D Busacca, BA, MBA, ACHA, LNHA
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 978-1-5462-7629
Genre: Self-Help
Pages: 98
Reviewed by: Allison Walker

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Despite its calm exterior, a nursing home is a bustling place. While residents relax into their sunset years, janitors are busy scrubbing floors, directors are making sure residents receive medical treatment, and coordinators are scheduling continuing educational opportunities for nurses. From physically maintaining the facility to dispensing medication, it seems author and Licensed Nursing Home Administrator Peter Busacca has covered every detail. One cannot read his book, How a Nursing Home Works, without developing a new appreciation for the work behind the scenes which makes comfort and accessibility in a nursing home possible.

The nursing home as Busacca presents it employs a variety of specialists; each person trained to assist residents in a certain way. As the caretakers of a vulnerable generation, nursing homes must work like a well-oiled machine to provide the highest standard of care possible. As a nursing home employee himself, Busacca is in an adept position to explain the responsibilities of each person on the staff. Even purchasing new equipment involves cooperation between a number of people both within and outside the nursing home, in order to get the most efficient product at the best price.

How a Nursing Home Works cleanly breaks down the complexities of a nursing home, although it may seem to be overly-simplistic for a person already working in the field. Should an employee or student need more information however, Busacca provides just enough to conduct additional research. For example, Busacca explains what the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act requires from healthcare providers in a way which is easy and plentiful enough for a resident to understand. Then, he also specifies how HIPAA interacts with ICD-9-CM, National Drug Codes, HCPCS and CPT-4. Anyone needing more information regarding HIPAA could feasibly enter those keywords into a search engine.

Unfortunately, this is also an example of how the book too often hovers in the awkward space between too much information for a resident and not enough for a healthcare employee. This book seems most practical for a nursing student, a sort of “Spark Notes” of lecture material. As someone who is not in the healthcare industry, the book does read long and legal section codes sometimes become jumbled on the page. Were pertinent information to be organized into a flowchart or bullet list, it would make deciphering the medical jargon much easier for us laypeople.

With this book in hand, readers will feel they’ve just been given insider knowledge to a nursing home, and in fact they have. Hours of Internet research, trying to decipher how to choose a humane and responsible home, is condensed and collected in this single volume. While narrowing the audience could make this book more reader-friendly, How a Nursing Home Works is potentially useful for all manner of people involved in a nursing home, whether you are an employee, resident or future-resident.