Who publishes it

This site is published by OwnersFirm, a St. Louis company that builds and runs reference sites for local businesses. The articles are written and edited by the Keep Her Home desk. No clinician works on this desk, and no article carries a person's name as author: these pages are not a doctor's opinion, and they should not be read as one.

Why it exists

People type the promise into a search box in their own words, often late at night: promise me no nursing home, mom wants to die at home how, can a house actually hold a dying parent. The search results tend to be a company pamphlet or a page aimed at people who already work in care. We wanted something written to the daughter or son who made the promise, in the order she has to think about it: what her mother needs, what this house can hold, what Missouri lets her write down, who pays for which hours, and what to say when a hospital discharge planner names a facility.

The site's one device is the keep-her-here ladder on the front page. It is deliberately not a ranking of nursing homes, hospices or agencies. It is a list of the things a house has to hold, with plain notes on when the question belongs to her care team instead of to you.

What it is not

• It is not medical advice. Whether hospice is right, when it starts, what a symptom means, what a dose should be: those belong with the physician who treats her and with the hospice or home health team if one is involved.
• It does not enroll anyone in hospice, home health or any Missouri program. When a program is named, its own public page is linked so you can read it there, not here.
• It does not score nursing homes, hospitals, hospices or agencies, and it does not speak against any of them. A parent's wish to stay home is a wish, not a verdict on anyone else's care.
• It does not publish prices. There is no public table of what any company charges by the hour, and this desk will not make one up.
• It does not collect health details. The front-page form takes a name, a phone, and a town or ZIP, and it tells you not to put health details in it.

The paid placement

One slot on this site is paid. It belongs to New Plan Care, an independently owned non-medical in-home care company based in Chesterfield, Missouri, which serves Ballwin, Chesterfield, Eureka, Glencoe, Grover, Pacific, Valley Park and St. Louis. New Plan Care is a client of OwnersFirm, which publishes this site, and it pays for that placement. The two companies are not commonly owned.

Every time that box shows up it is marked as paid, it lives outside the articles, and nothing on the page was scored to put it there. Nothing in the articles was paid for, and no article was written to favor the client over any other way of keeping a parent at home. Where an article mentions that private-duty help can fill a gap, that is because Missouri's own description of care in the home says so, and the citation is on the page. What you send from the front page reaches New Plan Care only. If you would rather Call, the number is (314) 405-0887.

How the facts are handled

Every number, program, deadline and dollar figure on this site links inline to a public source: a federal or Missouri government page, a court-published statute, the Missouri Bar, or a major nonprofit. This desk opened every cited page on the date listed on the sources page, and confirmed the sentence was there. Where a source has no year, we do not add one. Where the bank of sources is silent, the site is silent.

Search engines are asked, for now, not to list these pages. That is deliberate. A person will read the site through again before that request is lifted.