Legal

Long-Term Care Ombudsman

Free, independent advocates for people living in nursing homes and residential care facilities. They take complaints about day to day care, health, safety and personal preference, and they work for the resident rather than for the facility. Most families do not know this exists until after they have tried to raise something with the facility itself and got nowhere.

Administered by California Department of Aging, through a local Ombudsman office. Details read from California Department of Aging, Long-Term Care Ombudsman and checked 2026-07-29.

How to apply

Call the Statewide Ombudsman Hotline on 1-800-231-4024, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Every long-term care facility is required to post the local and statewide numbers where residents can see them.

Open the official page Call 1-800-231-4024

We are not this agency and we cannot apply on anybody's behalf. Applying is free, and no one needs to pay a third party to do it.

What we screen on

These are the rules the checker actually uses. Every one carries the source it was read from and the date it was read, so you can check us.

We hold no bright-line eligibility rule for this programme yet. That means we will not narrow it, and we will not rule anybody out of it. The agency decides, and the official page below is the place to start.

What we will not tell you

We will not tell you that you qualify for this, because that is the agency's decision and not ours. We screen against the rules above, we show which ones we could check, and we say plainly when a rule exists that we do not hold.

Check this household against every programme