Pennsylvania requires a secured dementia care unit to hand families a written description of what it provides — here is what the disclosure covers and how Philadelphia families should read it.
By Philly Senior Advisor Care Team — Licensing & Memory Care Team · September 12, 2026
Every family touring memory care in Greater Philadelphia ends up in the same room: bright, clean, a keypad by the door, a marketing director who is warm and genuinely believes everything she is saying. You leave with a folder of glossy sheets and no way to compare the place in Bryn Mawr to the place in Mayfair. What almost no one asks for is the one piece of paper that makes those two places comparable. Pennsylvania requires a secured dementia care unit to give prospective residents and their families a written description of what the unit actually provides — its philosophy of care, the services included, the staffing and training behind them, the physical design of the secured area, the activity program, the costs, and the criteria under which someone can be admitted and under which they can be asked to leave. That written dementia-care disclosure is the single most useful artifact in the entire search, and it is routinely left in a drawer because families do not know to request it.
The reason it matters is that "memory care" is a marketing term, not a Pennsylvania license category. There is no memory care license in this state. What exists are Personal Care Homes and Assisted Living Residences licensed by the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services, some of which operate a secured dementia care area under the additional requirements that attach to it. A keypad on a hallway door tells you the building has a locked door. The disclosure tells you what the license behind that door obliges the operator to do. Ask for it in writing, by name, on the first tour, and ask the operator to point you to the regulation the disclosure is written under. An operator who cannot produce it quickly has told you something useful.
Pennsylvania splits residential senior care between two DHS license types with two separate sets of regulations. Personal Care Homes sit under 55 Pa. Code Chapter 2600. Assisted Living Residences sit under 55 Pa. Code Chapter 2800, the framework created by Act 56 of 2007. Nursing homes are a third thing entirely, licensed by the Pennsylvania Department of Health under its own chapter of the code and certified separately by CMS. All three can and do advertise memory care, and the phrase means something different in each.
The distinction is not academic when dementia advances. An Assisted Living Residence is built around the idea of aging in place and can, with the right supplemental designation and services, retain a resident through a higher level of need than a Personal Care Home typically can. A Personal Care Home provides assistance with activities of daily living but has a ceiling, and when a resident crosses it the home is obliged to discharge. That is why the discharge criteria buried on page three of a disclosure deserve more of your attention than the dining room. A family in Norristown that chooses a lovely Personal Care Home and gets a thirty-day notice eighteen months later has paid a move-in fee, uprooted a parent with dementia twice, and learned the license distinction the expensive way. Ask which license the building holds, ask whether the dementia area is inside that license or under a supplemental designation, and check the answer yourself on the DHS facility locator rather than taking it from a brochure.
Families hear secured and picture a locked ward. Pennsylvania's requirements are considerably more interesting than that. A secured dementia care unit is expected to address egress in a way that keeps residents from wandering out unsupervised while still satisfying fire safety and life safety requirements, which is why you will see delayed-egress hardware, alarmed doors and enclosed courtyards rather than simple deadbolts. But the regulatory attention is not only on the door. The rules reach staffing levels appropriate to the residents' needs, dementia-specific training for direct care staff over and above the baseline annual training every direct care worker in a licensed home must complete, a structured activity program suited to cognitive impairment rather than a bingo schedule borrowed from the general population, and an environment designed to reduce agitation and support orientation.
What secured does not mean is a right to restrain. Pennsylvania's regulations for both license types restrict the use of physical and chemical restraints, and a secured area is not a workaround. Nor does secured imply skilled nursing. A resident in a secured dementia area of an Assisted Living Residence in Ambler is not receiving nursing facility care, and if her medical needs escalate to that level the setting has to change. Families should ask two blunt questions on every tour: what specific behaviors or changes would trigger a discharge from this unit, and what have you done in the last year when a resident reached that point? The second question produces far more honest answers than the first.
Bring the disclosure home and read it against what you saw. Then go back with a short list. How many direct care staff are on the unit at 3 a.m., not at 2 p.m. when you toured? What is the dementia-specific training — hours, who delivers it, and is it repeated annually or once at hire? What is the plan when a resident with dementia is hospitalized at Abington, Lankenau or Temple: is the bed held, at what cost, and for how long? Who administers medications on the unit, under what supervision, and how are errors documented? What is included in the base rate and what is a level-of-care add-on, because in Greater Philadelphia memory care commonly runs in the range of roughly $6,200 to $8,600 a month and the difference between two quotes is usually the add-on structure rather than the room.
Then verify independently. The DHS facility locator carries licensing and inspection information for Personal Care Homes and Assisted Living Residences; the Department of Health's facility search and Medicare Care Compare cover nursing homes, home health and hospice. If the building is in Philadelphia, remember that the city and county are the same government — consolidated since 1854 — so there is no separate county office to call, and Philadelphia Corporation for Aging is the Area Agency on Aging for the whole of it. In the collar counties the equivalents are Montgomery County Aging and Adult Services, the Bucks County Area Agency on Aging, the Delaware County Office of Services for the Aging, and the Chester County Department of Aging Services. The Pennsylvania Long-Term Care Ombudsman Program, housed in the Department of Aging, will talk to families about a specific facility before a move as well as after one, and almost nobody uses it that way.
The disclosure is a promise. The inspection record is the audit. When they conflict, believe the audit, and then ask the operator to explain the gap — the explanation is data. A citation for insufficient staff training on a dementia unit two years ago that was corrected and never repeated is a different fact from the same citation appearing in three consecutive inspections. Ask for the most recent inspection report directly from the operator as well as pulling it yourself; an operator who hands it over without flinching is telling you about their culture.
If something is wrong after a move-in, the escalation path in Pennsylvania is specific and it works better than families expect. Raise it in writing with the administrator first and keep a copy. Bring in the Long-Term Care Ombudsman, who can advocate without your parent being identified as the complainant. File a complaint with DHS Personal Care Home and Assisted Living licensing for a licensed PCH or ALR, or with the Department of Health for a nursing home. Pennsylvania also maintains a statewide elder abuse reporting line through the Department of Aging for suspected abuse or neglect of an older adult — confirm the current number through the Department of Aging or your county Area Agency on Aging before you need it, and keep it on the refrigerator. Payment is a separate track from licensing and should not be allowed to stall a complaint: whether the bill is covered privately, through Community HealthChoices, through the Department of Aging's OPTIONS Program, or through LIFE Philadelphia — Pennsylvania's National PACE program, which is not the same thing as the state's PACE and PACENET prescription subsidies — has no bearing on a resident's right to the care the disclosure described.
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