By Cleveland Senior Advisor Care Team · August 26, 2026
Ohio has no memory care license or state certification — no inspection score you can look up before you walk in. What it does require is a written disclosure. Here is what has to be in it, and what to ask on the tour that it won't cover.
The paperwork problem families run into
You call a community in Beachwood or Rocky River, ask if they're "certified" for memory care, and get a confident yes. In Texas that word means something specific: a state certification with its own inspection standard. In Ohio, it doesn't. There is no such certification. What the person on the phone is describing is almost always a special care unit — a locked or secured wing of an ordinary Residential Care Facility (RCF) license — and the actual state requirement attached to it is a disclosure document, not a survey.
That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should, because it changes what you can verify before you sign anything. A CMS star rating on a nursing home tells you how the last few surveys went. Ohio's memory care disclosure tells you what the facility says its own policy is. Nobody from the state checks it against what actually happens on the unit unless a complaint triggers an investigation. The disclosure is real and useful — it's just a different kind of document than most families expect, and knowing that going in changes how you use it.
What Ohio's rule actually requires
The requirement lives in Ohio Administrative Code 3701-16-07(F)(5), last updated July 12, 2024. Before admission, or any time a prospective resident or their sponsor asks for it, a facility operating a special care unit has to hand over its written policy for that unit, and the policy has to cover a specific list: a mission or philosophy statement for the population served; admission and screening criteria; transfer and discharge criteria and procedures; a weekly staffing plan, including how it differs from staffing in the rest of the building and how much additional supervision residents get because of cognitive impairment or decreased safety awareness; a description of activities and how they're tailored to the unit; the cost of services; staff training and continuing-education practices; how assessments are done and how services change as a resident's needs change; how behavioral healthcare needs are addressed, if relevant; the physical design features meant to support residents' functioning; family involvement and support programs; and any services offered on the unit that go beyond what the rest of the facility provides.
That's a long list, and it's worth reading item by item rather than skimming, because most of the useful comparison points between two communities are buried in it. The staffing plan item in particular — how many more staff hours per resident the memory care wing gets over general assisted living — is usually the single best predictor of day-to-day quality, and it's one families rarely ask for in writing before touring.
A separate rule, 3701-16-01(LL), is what defines a special care unit in the first place. If a community advertises "memory care" or a "secured neighborhood" but tells you it doesn't have a formal special care unit designation, ask directly whether the disclosure requirement applies to them and why not — that's a question worth a direct answer, not a brochure.
What the disclosure is not
It is not an inspection. Ohio's Department of Health licenses and surveys Residential Care Facilities, and license status is searchable, but the memory care disclosure itself isn't a state form that gets filed or scored anywhere. It's a facility-authored document the facility is legally required to produce and hand over — the state sets the required contents, not the answers.
It is not a rating. CMS star ratings on Medicare's Care Compare tool cover nursing homes only. Ohio's RCFs — which is the license type covering both ordinary assisted living and memory care — don't appear on Care Compare at all. The Ohio Department of Aging's Long-Term Care Quality Navigator publishes some consumer-facing information about assisted living communities, but it isn't a CMS-style star system and it doesn't cover every community in Cuyahoga County. If you're used to comparing nursing homes by star rating, there is no equivalent one-glance number for memory care here. The written disclosure and a direct conversation on the tour are the two tools you actually have.
And it is not a state memory care certification. We've seen this claimed online for Ohio facilities — it isn't accurate. Some other states (Texas is the commonly cited example) run a separate Alzheimer's/dementia care certification with its own state inspection track. Ohio doesn't have a parallel program. A facility that tells you it's "state-certified for memory care" is either speaking loosely about its RCF license or describing something that doesn't exist as a distinct Ohio credential. Ask them to point you to the specific license or rule they mean.
Questions the disclosure won't answer for you
The written policy tells you what the facility says it does. It won't tell you whether the day shift was actually fully staffed last Tuesday, or how long it took someone to respond the last time a resident tried to leave through an unlocked door. Those are tour questions, and they're worth asking out loud rather than assuming the paperwork covers them.
Ask to see the staffing plan for a specific shift, not just the aggregate ratio — evenings and overnight are where memory care units are most often short. Ask what "increase in supervision" means in practice: is it more staff, more frequent checks, both? Ask how they handle a resident who becomes agitated or tries to elope, and whether that's ever resulted in a discharge — the disclosure is required to describe the transfer and discharge criteria, so ask them to walk through what that's looked like in a real case, not just cite the policy language. Ask what happens when a resident's needs progress past what the unit can safely provide; Ohio bars RCFs from retaining residents who need more than eight hours a day of skilled nursing, physical or chemical restraints, ventilator support, or stage III/IV pressure ulcers, so a genuine plan for that transition point should already exist and the facility should be able to describe it without hesitation.
Ask about family involvement specifically — the disclosure has to describe family support programs, but the honest version of that answer is how often family actually shows up to see it in action, not just what's printed. And ask directly what the memory care unit costs beyond the base rate, since RCF cost structures in Ohio commonly layer a base rate plus a level-of-care add-on, and the add-on for a special care unit is frequently the larger of the two.
Verifying the rest — because the disclosure is only one document
The disclosure covers the unit's own policy. It doesn't tell you whether the facility currently holds a valid RCF license in good standing, and that's separate, checkable information. Confirm current license status before you tour, not after you've fallen in love with the building — a facility mid-complaint-investigation or with a lapsed license is a different conversation entirely. This site's guide to verifying a facility's license walks through where to check that, and the RCF licensing explainer covers what the base license does and doesn't guarantee about a facility's memory care wing specifically.
If something goes wrong after a resident is admitted — a transfer you disagree with, a concern about how a behavioral incident was handled, a question about whether the staffing plan on paper matches what's happening on the floor — Ohio's Long-Term Care Ombudsman Program is the free, confidential channel for that. For Cuyahoga, Geauga, Lake, Lorain, and Medina counties, that's Region 10A, run by the Long-Term Care Ombudsman of Cleveland, at 1-800-365-3112. If your parent is in Summit or Portage county instead, that's a different regional office — Region 10B, Direction Home Akron Canton Area Agency on Aging and Disabilities, at 1-800-421-7277 — a distinction we've covered in more depth elsewhere on this site because families searching "Cleveland ombudsman" while their parent lives in Stow or Kent end up calling the wrong office more often than you'd expect.
A short list to bring with you
Ask for the written special care unit disclosure in advance of the tour, not during it, so you have time to actually read all twelve required items rather than skim them in the lobby. Bring the staffing-plan and cost questions above in writing. Confirm current license status separately before you go. Tour at least once at a time you weren't invited for — a Tuesday evening tells you more than a scheduled Saturday morning walkthrough ever will. And if the answer to any of these questions is vague or deflected rather than specific, treat that as data, not bad luck — a well-run unit can usually describe its own staffing plan and discharge criteria in plain language without having to check with someone else first.
