Editorial standards

Where does Norfolk Senior Advisor get its facts?

Regulatory statements come from the Code of Virginia and the Virginia Administrative Code (22VAC40-73 for assisted living), program facts from DMAS, DARS and VDSS, costs from the CareScout 2025 Cost of Care Survey, and provider data from the VDSS facility search and the CMS Provider Data Catalog.

Each guide carries a "last verified" date. Dollar figures that change every year -- the Auxiliary Grant rate, Medicaid spousal allowances, VA pension rates, the Medicare skilled nursing coinsurance -- are re-checked against the issuing agency each January and July.

What will Norfolk Senior Advisor not publish?

We will not publish a figure we cannot trace to a primary source, a Hampton Roads cost average (none is published), a memory care cost median (none exists), facility rankings or ratings of our own, or reviews and testimonials we cannot attribute to a real person.

Nursing home star ratings on this site are CMS's official Care Compare ratings, labelled as such and reproduced without adjustment. Assisted living has no state or federal rating in Virginia, so we show the inspection record instead of inventing a score.

How does Norfolk Senior Advisor handle facility data?

Facility rows are copied from bulk official data -- the VDSS licensing roster and posted inspections, and CMS provider files -- downloaded on October 28, 2026 and refreshed quarterly. We do not edit, soften or omit inspection findings.

Profile pages exist only where the public record supports a meaningful summary; other licensed providers appear as rows in the directory and locality tables. Violation text is the first sentence of the inspector's own description as VDSS posts it.

How do corrections work at Norfolk Senior Advisor?

Email advisors@norfolksenioradvisor.com with the page and the correction. Facility operators can ask us to update a listing after the state or CMS record changes; we correct errors quickly but we will not remove accurate public-record information on request.

If an agency changes a program -- a new Auxiliary Grant rate, a revised waiver limit -- we update the affected guides and the last-verified date together, so you can see when a page was last checked.

How does Norfolk Senior Advisor keep its writing useful rather than generic?

Each page answers a specific question in its first paragraph, names the Virginia agency or rule involved, and points to the record you can check yourself. We would rather publish fewer pages than pad a locality or facility page that the public record cannot support.

That is also why some localities have only an overview page: where a city has one or two licensed facilities, a separate assisted living or memory care page would repeat the overview. Facility profiles follow the same rule -- if the record is too thin for a useful summary, the facility appears as a directory row instead of a page of filler.