Editorial Policy

Who writes and edits

Everything on this site is written and maintained by the Hospice for Choices editorial team. We are not a care provider, a placement agency or a licensing body, and our pages are not medical advice.

How listings are built

Listings come only from public state licensing records. In California, the source is the California Department of Social Services, Community Care Licensing Division, which publishes its data under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license.

We include facilities the state lists as “licensed” or “on probation.” Closed and pending facilities are not shown.

State records arrive in capital letters, so we convert names and addresses to normal capitalization. We add map coordinates using the U.S. Census Bureau geocoder. That is the full extent of our changes. We never edit a license number, a license status or a capacity.

The data sources page names the exact dataset and shows the date of the state data currently on the site.

How often we update

We check the state data source monthly and refresh the listings when the state publishes new data. The state’s own file can lag behind real changes at a home, so a listing may not reflect something that happened last week. Always confirm details with the facility and the licensing agency.

How guides are researched

Our guides are researched from primary sources: state regulations and official agency pages. Each guide lists its sources at the end so you can check them yourself.

What we don’t publish

We don’t show ratings, reviews or prices. We don’t rank homes or recommend one over another.

Nobody pays to be listed, and nobody pays for a better position. There is no paid placement. We don’t take referral fees and we don’t arrange admissions.

Corrections

If you find an error, tell us. Families can use the contact form. Facility owners and operators can use the claim or correction form.

We fix errors in our guides and in our formatting of listings when they’re reported. License status and capacity are a different case. Those come straight from the state, so a correction also has to go to the licensing agency. Once the state’s data reflects it, the listing here will follow at our next refresh.