How to Check a Central Ohio Facility’s Inspection Record Before You Move a Parent In

Ohio inspects the buildings your parent is considering, and much of what the inspectors found is public. Most families never think to look.

By Ray Kessler, Certified Senior Advisor · Published October 23, 2026

The Question Families Ask a Week Too Late

A daughter in Westerville tours three assisted living communities on a Tuesday afternoon. The lobbies are bright, the activity calendars are full, the marketing directors are warm and well-prepared. She picks the one with the nicest dining room, puts down a deposit, and moves her father in eleven days later. Three months in, a nurse she trusts mentions offhandedly that the building has had a rough couple of years. Only then does she go looking for the inspection history, and only then does she learn that there was something to find.

This is one of the most common regrets we hear, and it is one of the easiest to avoid. Ohio inspects nursing homes and residential care facilities, writes down what it finds, and makes a good deal of that record available to the public. Nobody hands it to you. Nobody at the facility is going to open the tour by describing their last survey. But the information exists, it is free, and a careful family can work through it in an evening. This guide walks through exactly where to look for a building in Franklin, Delaware, Fairfield, Licking, Madison, Pickaway or Union County, what each source actually covers, and the blind spots that trip people up.

Who Inspects What in Ohio

Start with the structure, because the sources make much more sense once you know who produces them. The Ohio Department of Health, through its Bureau of Survey and Certification, is the agency that surveys long-term care facilities in Ohio. ODH states that it licenses and/or certifies approximately 960 nursing homes and facilities across the state, and its complaint jurisdiction extends further still, covering residential care facilities, intermediate care facilities for people with intellectual disabilities, county homes and unlicensed homes, along with hospitals, home health and hospice agencies and other providers.

The rhythm of inspection matters too. ODH notes that under federal regulations, each nursing home in Ohio receives at least one unannounced inspection during a nine- to fifteen-month survey cycle. On top of that scheduled cycle, ODH conducts complaint-driven surveys when someone reports a problem, and those visits are unannounced as well. Enforcement sits with a separate bureau, and the remedies ODH lists run from civil monetary penalties and denial of payment through state monitoring, directed in-service training, termination of Medicare and Medicaid provider agreements and licence revocation.

Medicare’s Care Compare, and Its Central Ohio Blind Spot

For nursing homes, the best-known tool is the federal one. Medicare’s Care Compare at medicare.gov publishes a five-star rating for each Medicare- and Medicaid-certified nursing home, built from health inspection results, staffing data and clinical quality measures, along with the underlying detail behind each component. ODH itself points families toward the federal nursing home comparison tool for quality-of-care information. It is a reasonable first stop for a skilled nursing facility in Grove City, Newark or Lancaster, and the staffing numbers in particular are worth more than the overall star count.

Here is the blind spot that catches almost everyone. Care Compare covers certified nursing homes only. The residential care facility your mother is actually touring in Dublin or Pickerington, the building everyone calls assisted living, is state-licensed rather than Medicare-certified, so it is not on Care Compare at all. Families who check the federal site, find nothing, and conclude that a facility has no record have simply looked in the wrong place. A great many central Ohio communities fall into this category, and for them you need Ohio’s own sources.

Ohio’s Long-Term Care Consumer Guide

The Ohio Department of Aging runs the Long-Term Care Consumer Guide, published at ltc.ohio.gov. Its reach is broader than the federal tool: the guide lets you search for and compare nursing homes, residential care facilities, which is to say assisted living, and supportive living facilities, and it also points to home and community-based services. The state describes it as a way to compare facilities on a range of factors including customer satisfaction, which is the piece you cannot easily get anywhere else.

Treat satisfaction data with the same care you would give any survey result. It reflects the people who responded, at the time they responded, and a building under new management may look better or worse than its published numbers. Still, a pattern across several years is meaningful, and a building that scores poorly on the same dimension repeatedly is telling you something. The Department of Aging also publishes a longer-run research series with the Scripps Gerontology Center at Miami University; the Winter 2025–2026 round included a report titled Nursing Homes in Ohio: A Profile alongside a long view of home- and community-based services from 1993 to 2023, with the next phase of that study set to begin in Spring 2026. Those reports will not tell you about one building, but they are useful if you want to understand where the state as a whole is heading.

The Licence Lookup Most Families Never Find

There is a third source that almost nobody outside the industry uses. ODH maintains a public health care provider lookup, reachable from its Health Care Provider and Services page, that returns real-time information on providers it licenses or that are Medicare and Medicaid certified, and lets you generate and print reports. Before you sign anything, it is worth confirming three plain facts there: that the licence is current, that the licence is held by the operator whose name is on the contract, and that the care category matches what the salesperson described to you.

That last point matters more than it sounds. Ownership in senior living changes hands often, and a building in Hilliard or Delaware may have had two or three operators in five years while keeping the same sign at the road. If the licence record and the paperwork name different companies, that is not necessarily a problem, but it is a question to ask out loud before a deposit changes hands.

Ask the Facility for the Survey Itself

Online tools summarise. The survey document is the thing itself, and you are entitled to see it. Federal rules require a nursing home to make the results of its most recent survey available for examination in a place readily accessible to residents, so for a skilled nursing building the right move is simply to ask at the front desk where the survey results are kept. For any facility, you can ask the administrator directly for the most recent statement of deficiencies and the plan of correction the facility filed in response.

When you have the document, read it for pattern rather than for drama. Any building of real size will have citations. What you want to know is how serious they were, whether they touched resident care or paperwork, whether the same deficiency recurs survey after survey, and whether the plan of correction reads like a genuine fix or a formality. Ask when the last survey took place and whether any complaint survey has happened since. And watch how the request is handled. An administrator who produces the file without fuss and talks you through the hard parts has told you something useful about the building’s culture. One who cannot find it, or who needs to check with corporate, has told you something too.

What No Record Can Tell You

A survey is a snapshot taken against minimum standards on the days the surveyors happened to be in the building. It is a floor, not a recommendation. It will not tell you whether the evening shift is thin, whether the same aides have worked the memory care wing for six years or six weeks, whether the food is genuinely good, or whether a building that is fine for an independent eighty-year-old can handle your father’s particular combination of needs eighteen months from now.

So use the record to screen and your own eyes to decide. Visit twice, and make one of those visits unannounced on a weekend or after five in the afternoon, when the office staff have gone home and you are seeing the building as residents actually experience it. Count the staff you can see. Notice whether call lights go unanswered while you stand in the hall. Ask a resident’s family member in the parking lot what they wish they had known. In Franklin County you often have enough options to walk away from a building that feels wrong; in Madison, Union or Pickaway County the supply is thinner, and knowing that in advance helps you plan on a realistic timeline rather than a crisis one.

If Something Is Already Wrong

If your parent is already in a building and you are worried, the complaint route is open to you and it is not difficult. ODH prefers its online complaint form, and also accepts complaints by email at [email protected] or by phone at 1-800-342-0553. You may choose to remain anonymous, and ODH says it cannot release the identity of a complainant or of a resident without consent. Two practical limits are worth knowing: the complaint needs enough specific detail for the bureau to open an investigation, and ODH generally does not investigate incidents more than a year old. Expect an acknowledgement letter with a tracking number, then a second letter telling you the outcome.

A Short Checklist Before You Sign

Confirm the licence is current and held by the operator named in your contract. Pull the Care Compare page if the building is a certified nursing home, and the Long-Term Care Consumer Guide entry either way. Ask the administrator for the most recent survey and plan of correction, and ask when the next survey is due. Note any deficiency that repeats across cycles, and ask what changed. Then visit once unannounced at an inconvenient hour. Finally, keep your own file: the licence printout, the survey, the contract and the names of the people who answered your questions. If a disagreement comes later, that file is the difference between a conversation and an argument. Our facility directory and FAQ can help you build the shortlist, and the Ohio residents’ bill of rights explains what your parent is owed once they have moved in.

Disclosure: we are a free advisory service, not a government agency, law firm or medical provider. Agency names, phone numbers, web tools and inspection procedures change, and a survey record is not a guarantee of the care any individual resident will receive. Confirm current details with the Ohio Department of Health, the Ohio Department of Aging or the Long-Term Care Ombudsman before relying on them.

Frequently Asked Questions