Hi Adam,
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Originally Posted by hektisk
Why would I use Word? Are the Reports found in Access lackluster?
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It's really a matter of what you want from the reports and how often you're be producing them. In some ways its like comparing Word and Excel. Word produces much documents with much richer formatting flexibility than Excel can, but Excel's got many built-in functions for number-crunching. Similarly, Access is great for data storage & retrieval - and has some good reporting and analysis tools, but neither is as comprehensive as Word for document-generation or Excel's for the number-crunching.
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As a nursing home, however, we can only bill once, so we'd only count the admission we'd be billing for 
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Yes, i can't really envisage your clients coming & going twice in a day - maybe over a month ...
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If I had a table on the hospitals or doctors, it'd literally be a one-column list of hospitals or doctors. The hospitals and doctors are specific to the admission date, so it'd be the same hospital and doctor through the assessment periods tied to an admission date. Would there still be benefit to giving them their own tables?
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The benefit lies in being able to retrieve data by hospital/doctor when doing data entry (you don't have to input all the details every time) and for subsequent reporting. If you know they're in the data in a consistent format, that makes retrieval much simpler.
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Can you explain what you mean by mail merge?
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Mailmerge is a means of extracting data from a spreadsheet or database and dropping it into a document. Useful when you want to produce things like mailing labels, standard letters (eg monthly statements), client lists etc.
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Would this just be a way to create input forms in another program (because they look better?) and then using them in Access?
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No. Mailmerge is for data extraction, not input.
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For someone as new as me, would I be better off doing everything (user forms, reports) in Access for the time being? Or am I missing something?
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ell, since you don't already have the Access db set up and running, no. You could, however, develop the Word mailmerge documents for use with Excel now and simply change their data source to Access later on. It's really quite straightforward to do this - possibly less than 5 min per mailmerge main document.