Performing a Home Care Assessment
A complete home care assessment is an essential step when coordinating care for a loved one. At Your Choice Caregivers, our home care assessments are an essential part of our approach to home care. Before starting care, we meet with every potential client for an in-depth discussion of their care needs. This allows us to carefully tailor our services to each client’s specific care concerns and challenges.
If you’re considering home care for a family member, it can be difficult to assess your loved one’s care needs on your own. Our care specialists typically have years of experience in performing home care assessments, making it possible for us to zero in on the specific care concerns of aging and disabled individuals. Without that kind of professional background, family caregivers can feel like they’re left without a road map when trying to set up care for a loved one. This can make it difficult to know when home care is needed and what level of care your loved one needs.
To make this process easier, the care experts at Your Choice Caregivers have put together the following guide to help you understand what goes into a home care assessment.
Determining When Home Care’s Needed
The first step in any home care pre-assessment is to establish if home care services will be necessary or beneficial to your loved one. Sometimes, the need for home care is obvious. But in other cases, you and your loved one will need to carefully assess your loved one’s current condition, their safety concerns, and the challenges and/or obstacles that make living at home difficult.
To determine whether or not home care is right for your loved one, there are three key questions you should be asking:
- Can your loved one live safely without care? If your loved one has physical or mental difficulties that make independent living unsafe, professional home care can help lower those risks.
- Can your loved one live comfortably without care? Some seniors are able to live safely with physical difficulties but do so with pain or discomfort. Home care can help alleviate these issues by providing assistance with specific tasks.
- Can your loved one live happily without care? Without care, many in need skip or miss out on aspects of daily life that bring them joy. An in-home caregiver can provide companionship and remove barriers to joyful activities.
If the answer to any of the above questions is “no” (or even “maybe”), you should consider meeting with a home care provider or providers.
Professional Care Assessments
Once you’ve determined that your loved one may require home care, you’ll want to meet with professional care providers. A quality care provider will perform a complete home care assessment before starting care to determine your loved one’s care needs. This makes it possible to precisely plan your loved one’s care according to his or her specific care concerns. During a home care assessment, care specialists will meet with you and your loved one to discuss your loved one’s greatest age-related or disability-related challenges, your loved one’s lifestyle and daily schedule, and your overall goals for care.
Getting to know your loved one is also a key part of the caregiver selection process. For care agencies like Your Choice Caregivers, a full in-home care assessment means that care directors are able to match your loved one with a caregiver whose personality, skills, and experience are best suited to your loved one’s needs. At Your Choice Craegivers, our Choose Your Caregiver program, allows our clients to choose their caregiver(s). This process is greatly aided by connecting clients with caregivers who we think would be a great match. Thanks to our in-depth care assessments, we’re able to suggest matches that closely meet our clients’ needs, making it easy for our clients to find the right care professional.
