Visiting Angels -- What is Home Care?
Home Care, Home Health, Hospice, Rehab -- How Do We Know What We Need?
We get this question often. Basically, home care is the non-medical services designed to help people who are struggling with activities of daily living (ADLs), live at home independently. Home health provides nursing services, physical, occupational and speech therapy; hospice provides comfort care to a patient with an incurable illness when medical treatments are no longer effective or desired.
Home care can operate independent of home health and hospice, or it can be used in conjunction by providing the necessary day-to-day support often required while receiving those services.
Resource: Difference between Home Health and Hospice
What are ADLs?
Home care service provide support with ADLs, which are typically defined as:
- Ambulating: aka "walking" and moving around.
- Feeding: Being able to get food from a plate into the mouth.
- Dressing and grooming: Picking appropriate clothes, putting them on, and keeping a healthy and neat personal appearance.
- Toileting: Getting to and from the toilet, using it, and effectively cleaning oneself.
- Bathing: Being able to effectively wash one’s body in the bath or shower.
- Transferring: Safely moving from one body position to another. This includes safely moving from a bed to a chair, or wheelchair; from a wheelchair or other assisted device to a couch, kitchen chair, or other location and vice-versa.
ADLs determine one's ability to care for themselves independently.
Home care is appropriate when a person has difficulty accomplishing any of these tasks safely.
What are IADLs?
Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADLs) are activities that are important to live independently, but unlike ADLs, they are not critical to everyday living.
There are typically twelve categories of IADLs:
- Managing household financesincluding paying bills
- Taking care of one's health, including scheduling and getting to doctor visits and taking medications correctly
- Shopping for food and supplies
- Prepping and cooking meals
- Transportation, including driving
- Using the telephone and other communication devices
- Household chores to keep the house clean and healthy, including dishes, sweeping, taking out the trash, doing laundry, etc
- Taking care of pets
- Caring for children
- Looking after others, including supervising caregivers
- Maintaining religious practices, hobbies, or other interests
- Knowing safety procedures and emergency contacts and responses
Home care is appropriate when a person's difficulty accomplishing these tasks impacts their ability to live healthy and safely at home.
Resource: National Institute of Health (NIH) - What are IADLs?
What are Typical Home Care Tasks?
Typical home care companies use a list of ADLs and IADLs when they describe their services. For example, we provide support with:
- Bathing
- Grooming
- Dressing
- Safety in the home, including fall prevention and helping those with cognitive deficiencies (Dementia, Alzheimers, etc) live safely
- Medication Reminders
- Meal Planning and Feeding
- Light housekeeping
- Transferring
- Errands and Shopping
- Companionship
Most home care companies should be able to perform these tasks with varied levels of quality.
What Makes Us Different?
Home care should be about more than checking off a list of tasks. Our caregivers build relationships with those they support. We go to great lengths to cater to your loved one's unique needs, as well as their preferences and personality. We take care of the tasks, but we focus on the person and their changing needs each day. If we are taking care of the person, those tasks will take care of themselves.
Because we are person-centered care company, we put a major emphasis on:
How people feel about themselves, how much they interact with others, and how often they do activities they enjoy is as important -- if not more -- than just checking off ADL/IADL tasks. Because physical health is very often linked to emotional health.
Resource: National Institute on Aging - Healthy Aging
Our goal is to make a difference in people lives. We do so by integrating some of the latest research on senior health, hiring the highest quality caregivers possible, building relationships, and taking a person-centered focus on care.
Call us if you have any questions about home care -- or senior care in general. Our team will be happy to help you navigate the often complex landscape.
Our number is easy to remember: 757-525-2525.
Serving Norfolk, Portsmouth, Suffolk and the Southern Hampton Roads Area
Visiting Angels NORFOLK, VA
273 Granby St #200Norfolk, VA 23510
Phone: 757-525-2525