Hattie Ide Chaffee Home is a 69-bed nursing home in Riverside, RI, with qualified nursing, memory care, hospice care, and respite care under the same roof. Licensed nurses are available at all hours.
Beds are tough to come by. When occupancy was last calculated, 98.6% of them were in use.
When dementia makes wandering a hazard, memory care keeps the inhabitant in a protected setting with personnel watching. Hospice is for the closing stretch of life. A respite stay is short, letting a family caregiver make a trip or heal from something of their own. Together, these cover a person who needs nursing assistance, one who needs oversight because of memory loss, and relatives who need someone to step in momentarily.
On a standard day, each resident gets an average of six hours and seven minutes of nursing care. Payment can be private, out of the resident’s or family’s own funds. Medicare picks up a brief skilled visit after time in the infirmary, and Medicaid takes over once funds run out partway through a long one.
The area around the facility is car-dependent, scoring 36 on Walk Score, so tasks mean organizing a lift. Barry B. Zeltzer, Ph.D., is the manager.










