I'm reaching out to this community to ask for help with getting the word out about a site I set up where we all can rate and review personal services such as nursing homes. My mother has Alzheimer's. We starting seeing signs when she was in her early 50's. Just last year we had to find a nursing home literally overnight for her when she took a severe turn for the worse. It was a nightmare. The traumatic experience of watching my mother and father go through this was enough in itself, but then add to that trying to find a quality nursing home that has Alzheimer's-specialized care. It was shortly thereafter that I starting working on the website, Tinkn.com

Please take a moment to go into the site and review nursing homes and other facilities. And please tell others as the site will only be as useful as the reviews so we need to spread the word.

Thanks so much.

Kristin, I don't even see a category for nursing homes, let alone information about any. Did you enter the wrong link?

You have to open the first link http://www.tinkn.com, click on senior citizen services, then the link nursing homes, select a state, select a letter for the city from the alphabet at top, click your city, it will list the nursing homes in that city or area.

To rate it, there is registration info to fill in. Didn't do that yet. A bit complicated, but just have to follow the links.

Hope this helps....

Whoops, forgot this link that will explain more what this is all about.

http://www.tinkn.com/about.php

Oh sista, in my first post about this, the link I posted is wrong, somehow I got a comma in there. Hopefully here is the correct first link.

http://www.tinkn.com/

I think this could be a good source of info if everyone follows through.

My mom passed about 10 years ago from AD. She lived with me and my wife (who also has AD now) until we could no longer cope.

The best advice I can give is to PLAN AHEAD. The good places will have long waiting lists. You need to look them over, find one that you like, and then get your name on the list.

The reason I was surprised that the link didn't lead to nursing home reviews is that Kristin says the site was inspired by her mother with AD. I expected a site devoted to nursing homes with memory centers.

Instead, I found a site that is set up to review anything and everything under the sun ... it takes effort to track down the nursing home section.

While I agree that we all need help in locating good nursing homes when the time comes, I'm not so sure that a site like this is going to get many responses. I was just at an AD facility yesterday, and was impressed with what I saw. So I just tried to locate reviews on the facility. tink.com doesn't even have my city in its list of places that have AD facilities (and we're something like the third largest city in the US).

So I used Google to look for reviews. There was precisely one (!!!) on all the many review sites that already exist for my city. (I found twenty reviews for the veterinarian clinic I eventually chose for my cats.) And that one review was from someone furious that she'd taken off and left a piece of jewelry there, and it "disappeared" and she felt the staff shouldn't "allow" things to disappear. Obviously the person who wrote the review was not someone very familiar with AD facilities, or qualified to comment on them...

Plus, there are already a number of well-established sites, devoted to nursing homes, that can be used to locate nursing homes near you and see how they rank, based on objective criteria, inspections, and complaints to authorities. Some allow you to search by name or by distance from your home, tell you how many beds, whether they take Medicaid, etc. Some give details on inspection violations. See, e.g.:

http://www.medicare.gov/NHComp...cp=1&bhhash=1#TabTop

http://health.usnews.com/secti...ing-homes/index.html

http://memberofthefamily.net/

http://www.snapforseniors.com

http://www.iqnursinghomes.com

I'm sure there are others, those were just the ones I could find quickly.

Thank you for all of your comments and responses. I would like to address some of the questions and concerns here.

Yes, the site has many more categories than just nursing homes. We felt that there are many other categories that would be important to our user community, such as daycares, veterinarians, doctors, etc. I have so many personal stories from throughout the years of difficulties finding quality services such as these for my family. This incident with my mother was truly the final catalyst that drove me to launch Tinkn.

As for the business listings themselves... we have populated over 6 million businesses on the site and continue to add more every day. We're also continuing to refine the categories and subcategories to make it easier for users to find things. Businesses too can add themselves, so if there is a nursing home, daycare, or other provider that you would like on there, contact them and let them know about Tinkn.

Yes, there are other review sites on the net. When we created Tinkn we wanted to create the easiest, most useful site possible for our user community. That's why you won't see any popup ads or fancy graphics that are certainly pretty, albeit annoying in my opinion, and will generate revenue, but are not useful to the users. You will also see many unique features on Tinkn, such as the scoring system that ensures the best businesses truly stand out (here's a link that illustrates this: Veterinarians in Eugene,) the "Map All" feature that shows the business's score on a map so you can find the best one closest to you, and the ease of navigation.

And yes, some review sites are struggling to get their user community to actually make reviews. That's why it's critically important to tell everyone you know about Tinkn.com so they will make reviews and help others by sharing their personal experiences. I think we all agree that when it comes time for us to need information in a pinch, the reviews from others will be invaluable. I remember a time when my son was very young and his daycare literally shut down over night. I was a single mom with a new job, and fairly new to town. I couldn't afford to take any time off and didn't have enough of a network of friends to know which daycares were close to my work/home and which were good. I would have loved to have a resource like Tinkn.com to turn to for help.

I hope this helps to address any questions or concerns. I appreciate everyone's feedback and of course any suggestions for improvements to the site are always welcome.

Warm regards,

Kristin Hartshaffer
http://www.tinkn.com