Home Care Vs. The Alternatives: How To Choose?

Many older Americans choose to move into some form of senior housing. But each year more and more choose to stay in their homes. It’s not a black-and-white choice, and whatever arrangement you choose, home care can dramatically expand your options.

For many these days, the ideal approach to aging involves aging in place—staying in your home and taking the steps necessary to remain independent for as long as possible. Many are still choosing the better-known options: retirement communities, assisted living facilities, and other institutions designed to care for older people. But an increasing number of seniors are choosing to stay at home and get whatever help they need to remain there.

Aging at home comes with all the same challenges: Health and mobility issues present threats to independence wherever you live. But home care agencies—which provide all the services that come with an assisted living facility, but do so in the client’s own home—can enable a senior to remain at home throughout the aging process, and at a cost comparable to other options.

Because many seniors choose to age in place because of their emotional attachment to a particular home or community, home care can also give loved ones the reassurance that their family members are being well cared for without forcing seniors into an unfamiliar, and possibly distressing, environment—and home care can, if needed, keep seniors at home all the way through the end of life. What’s more, home care can also expand the range of options available to any senior, allowing them to choose to stay at home—or seek care outside of it—as best suits their situation.

Kinds of Care

Before we talk about choosing between home care and out-of-home care, we should probably talk about the types of care available to people looking for help as they age. Roughly speaking, they fall into two main categories: the types of care you can receive in your home, and the types you can only receive by leaving home.

In-Home Care
There are various kinds of help that someone can receive at home:

Home Care
Strictly speaking, “home care” covers two main types of non-medical care delivered in the client’s home: help with activities of daily living (things like bathing, eating, keeping track of medications, and mobility) and instrumental activities of daily living (essential tasks that aren’t directly related to physical needs, like preparing meals, light housekeeping, and other household chores). Many home care companies will separate these two categories into personal care and companion care or housekeeping.

Recovery Care
Home care is often thought of as something that’s provided for the long haul. Recovery care, on the other hand, involves all the same services as home care, but is provided on a temporary basis for someone dealing with an acute issue such as recovery from a surgery or an injury.

Respite Care
Another type of temporary care, respite care is home care provided when a client’s ordinary caregivers are unavailable.

Home Health Care
This type of care is also called skilled nursing care. Home health care is the provision in the home of the kinds of services usually provided in a nursing home or rehabilitation facility, such as regular changes of bandages or wound dressings, the actual administration of medication, intravenous treatment or nutrition, and other complex interventions requiring higher level nursing skills.

Hospice and Palliative Care
Hospice care involves specialized care for those approaching the end of life; palliative care involves caring for anyone suffering from an underlying disease that is regarded as untreatable. In both types of care, the aim is to keep the client comfortable: this will often require a combination of home care—to keep the client in good spirits and as healthy as possible—and home health care—to administer medication or perform any necessary medical interventions.

Care outside of the home:

Senior Living
Senior living isn’t really a form of care, or even of institutionalization. In senior living, fully able older adults who just want to let go of the responsibilities of living alone will sometimes move into a retirement community or senior housing community. This type of housing is usually designed specifically to be used by seniors, and can take the form of apartments, condominiums, or even freestanding homes. Such living arrangements almost never include the types of services covered by home care, though the communities may, by design, make life easier in general for the aged.

Assisted Living
Assisted living facilities provide room and board and some assistance with activities of daily living. But while “assisted living” is sometimes used as a catch-all for any senior housing that includes some kind of personal care, such facilities may not have medical professionals on staff in the way they would be at a nursing home.

Respite Care
Just as with home care, some assisted living facilities and nursing homes provide temporary care for a client whose main caregivers may not be available, or may need a temporary rest.

Concierge Care
Some seniors in a senior living, assisted living, or nursing home situation may require more help than the staff may want to take on, or may want to hire a dedicated caregiver who will give them personalized care. In these cases, they will often access concierge care, in which a home care agency assists them in the facility where they reside.

Nursing Home
Seniors with more serious health issues may need to enter a nursing home. These types of facilities are also known as skilled nursing facilities—and may also go by the name of long-term care facilities or rehabilitation facilities. Nursing homes provide more complex types of types of medical assistance and generally offer direct assistance to address patients’ health problems.

Hospice
Hospice is a specialized facility for housing and offering care to those who are approaching the end of life: usually the care offered can only deal with the symptoms of any underlying illness, provided with the aim of making the patient as comfortable as possible.

Next: Home Care Vs. The Alternatives: Choosing the Right Care For You

Source: https://www.aginginplace.org/complete-guide-to-in-home-senior-health-care/