As I mentioned in my last post, in May of this year I jumped into the running of our growing senior home care business, Avail Home Care. Before taking on this inspiring challenge, I didn’t know much about the senior home care space. One of the most important things that I’ve learned?
NO ONE WHO DOESN’T WORK IN THIS SPACE LEARNS ABOUT IT UNTIL THEY HAVE TO…AND THAT’S A MISTAKE.
When Most People Learn About Senior Home Care
Most people don’t learn about this space until something goes wrong, meaning that a spouse, mother, father, uncle, aunt, cousin, friend…has some kind of acute incident that leaves them needing access to care in their homes. It might be a stroke or heart attack. It might be a fall. It might be the onset of dementia.
Regardless of the trigger, it’s at this moment that both the patient (loved one) needing care and his/her associated family are suddenly shoved right through the looking glass into an ecosystem of services so complex and convoluted that they wonder if they’ve suddenly started taking crazy pills. Nothing is easy, nothing makes any sense, and it must be navigated WHILE dealing with the stress of someone you love needing help.
Actual calls we’ve gotten:
“My mom had a stroke and the rehab is going to discharge her in six days. I have to figure out whether we can afford home care or an ALF or if we have to spend her down to Medicaid. I’m freaking out.”
“My uncle and aunt moved to Independent Living and he hates it. Wants to move back into his house, but she has dementia and will need full time care. We’re looking at our options.”
“Dad’s been taking care of Mom since she was declared legally blind and had her license taken away, but now he’s been diagnosed with cancer. We live up North and don’t know what to do!”
When People Should Learn About Senior Home Care
In an ideal world, all of us would:
- look at all of this ahead of time,
- learn the lingo and the way it all works,
- make financial preparations (whatever you can), and
- make decisions as a family about what steps to take as older members of the family age.
But this isn’t what we do. We almost all wait until it’s too late to make calm, rational decisions as a family. Why? Because we don’t like to talk about aging and death. So we just wait until we can’t avoid the conversation any longer and…
NOW we’re under SERIOUS stress.
NOW we may not even have the ability to know what Mom or Dad wants (dementia, too injured, etc).
NOW we certainly may not have the funds.
SO WE’RE GOING TO HELP…
This topic is so layered and confusing that we’ve broken it up into several small, easily consumable pieces to help you to learn at your own pace and to skip around to the parts that matter most to you right now.
Don’t wait until something happens! (Or if it has, then please DIVE IN!) It’s time to get your LEARNIN’ on so you can come at this whole thing like a PRO.
We will cover:
- What is Home Care?
- Who pays for Home Care?
- How Much Home Care Is Needed?
- Do we need Home Care or a Facility?
- Who is there to help us?
- What is all this friggin’ paperwork about?
I know that you’re probably not chomping at the bit to learn about this topic, but we promise to make our explanations clear, friendly, and human.