Choosing a good nursing home for yourself or a loved one can take a lot of work. The federal government has resources that can help.

Q: My mom died of breast cancer in 2005. My dad, who is 91, recently had a heart attack, and his doctor says that he must go to a nursing home for full-time care. Can you provide any information about choosing a good nursing home?

A: Sadly, yes. I had to deal with a similar issue when my late father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2006, and then again when my mother fell ill and passed away earlier this year.

Start your search for the best nursing home by contacting the federal Eldercare Locator at 800-677-1116, or eldercare.gov on the Internet. This government-run agency provides lots of useful information, including a list of nursing homes near you.

The agency also can give you contact information for your local ombudsperson — a government official who is responsible for inspecting nearby nursing homes, investigating complaints and fighting for the rights of the home’s residents and caring family members like you.

Make some unannounced visits to each facility that you’re considering for your dad.

Experts say the best time for such visitations are in the middle of the morning — to make sure that the staff has gotten everyone out of bed — and at suppertime, to ensure that residents are eating in the cafeteria and socializing rather than staying in their own room.

Also use your visits to strike up casual conversations with the nurses and other medical professionals who would take care of your parent. Ask the nurses how many residents they care for — the lower the number, the better. After you have narrowed your hunt to three or four facilities, talk to each home’s top administrator as well as its nursing director.

Good nursing-home care starts at the top, so you want to ensure that the management is both caring and compassionate.

Also ask the officials for a copy of the state government’s inspection survey, usually called Form 2567. Federal law requires that the report be readily available, so it’s cause for concern if the home makes you jump through lots of hoops to get it or won’t provide the document at all.

Finally, check with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (cms.gov), an Internet site operated by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It provides lots of additional information about choosing a nursing home, including federal programs that can help pay for the bills and a state-by-state list of homes that aren’t meeting government standards.

Does anyone actually live at the North Pole?

Yes, but there aren’t many. Besides the Claus family and their eight tiny reindeer, there is only a handful of people — mostly scientists and military personnel — willing to brave its 50-below cold in the winter. With its high winds in December, the temperature is sometimes equivalent to 200 degrees below Fahrenheit — enough to literally freeze a person who foolishly walks outside for a minute or two.

Building a traditional house there also would pose a problem because there’s no land beneath the Pole. It’s basically just a big ice cube, floating above the Arctic Ocean in the winter and then shrinking to half its size in July, when the temperature reaches a “balmy” 32 F.

There’s also a town named North Pole in Alaska, but it’s about 1,700 miles to the south of the geographic North Pole. The Alaskan community is the home of about 2,000 people, the Census Bureau says, and is a popular stop for those visiting nearby Fairbanks — especially in the summer.

I am trying to restore my credit so I can get a mortgage to purchase a home in the spring. In September, I paid off a credit-card account that had been sent to a collections agency, but the account is still showing on my credit report. When will it be removed?

Sorry, but it probably will take a long time for the account to disappear from your record.

Like you, many people think that paying off a delinquent account will immediately remove it from their credit file and quickly boost their score. But in reality, your report is a history of how you have handled your debt obligations during the past several years.

Paying the delinquent account was a good move toward raising your score, but the improvement won’t come overnight. Though your report today will show that you recently paid the bill in full, the account likely will remain on your record for about seven years from the date that the bank sent notification of your late payment to the credit bureaus.

You can improve your score much more quickly if you pay all future bills on time, but it’s doubtful that it will rise fast enough to allow you to purchase a home in the spring. That’s because most lenders have tightened their mortgage-application standards and are less forgiving of borrowers with damaged credit. Your best option might be to delay your home-buying plans until your credit score, and the housing market, start to get better a year or so from now.