1. Awaiting nursing home placement may be viewed as a situational crisis for elders in acute care facilities. 2. Crisis intervention techniques focus on solving the immediate problem in the person's life to re-establish emotional equilibrium in the individual. 3. The more predictable the new nursing home environment is to the elder, the less negative the effects of relocation. 4. Ethically, it must be assumed that cognitively impaired elders will benefit from some form of crisis intervention prior to nursing home relocation.