Home care provides support for individuals to live independently at home, offering non-medical assistance (personal care, housekeeping, errands) from professionals, helping seniors, those recovering from illness, or people with disabilities with daily activities and health management in a familiar environment. Services range from bathing and meal prep to medication reminders, tailored to individual needs, allowing people to "age in place" comfortably.

It starts with the hiring of the caregiver. We do extensive and thorough background checks that include doing sex offender Federal, State, and County searches, as well as looking on the Medicaid exclusion list. We also do an extensive Adult Protective Services and Child Protective Services background check for each caregiver. On top of that, they have a competency test that they need to score 80% or higher on. We then require them to pass a skills assessment. From there, they are provided ongoing training on a monthly basis as well as initial training required in the first month of employment with Sunlight Senior Care.

There are many ways to pay for home care.

-The primary way is private pay and out-of-pocket funds that the client has.

-An alternative way is to use long-term care insurance that the client would have had to purchase prior to services.

-A third way to pay for our services is to use Veteran's Benefits or Medicaid waiver services.

Anyone can benefit from home care services. The problem is that many families and clients wait until it's too late instead of slowly introducing the services to help the clients stay independent longer and have a better quality of life. Many times, services are reactionary due to a fall or some type of health issue.  We have the best outcomes when our services are introduced as a proactive solution.

Depending on the state regulations, caregivers may or may not be licensed.  Many times, we use current or former certified nursing assistants as our caregivers. They go through training during the onboarding process. Then, during their first month, they have extra training that they must go through. After that, they must follow through with ongoing training on a monthly basis.

There's a few different ways that we can start home care services. The way that we typically try to follow is:

1. A thorough phone intake followed up by what we call a "sofa visit" in which we meet with the client and the family to discuss goals, questions, concerns, and discuss how we can be of benefit with our services. From there, the documents and consents are signed.

2. We then move forward with scheduling and setting up a start of care date. 

3. On that first day of services, typically our client care coordinator will come out to do an assessment and create what they call a "plan of care." This is the blueprint that the caregiver is to follow when they're providing services. 

4. From there, the scheduler and client care coordinator will follow up on a regular basis to make sure that the plan of care is being followed and that the client is satisfied.