Nate Benjamin
In my previous post I explained the difference between Home Care and Home Health (see below). In this post I would like to explain how our agency works together for the mutual benefit of our clients, whether elder clients or younger. Home Health provides nursing and therapists who can then advise us on how to care for the client. Since the nurse is only there maybe 1-2 times a week for about 30-45 minutes, they can advise our caregivers on specific cares as we are usually in the home for a much longer duration, sometime even 24 hours. They can also fill the clients medication boxes which then allows our caregivers to provide medication reminders. This is important for our seniors who often struggle with their memory and remembering to take their medications.
Another way we work together is the home health therapist can provide instruction for our caregivers to help our clients with exercises they need to do regularly when the therapist isn’t there. We can then help our clients with their exercises by encouraging and motivating them to do their exercise homework and by safely assisting them with the exercise to prevent injury and falls.
We can also provide feedback and insight on how our clients and their patients are doing, whether they are progressing, maintaining or regressing. Because we are usually in the home for a longer duration, we can make more frequent observations. Shift notes are recorded in our notebook by our caregivers and available for the home health clinicians to review. Our nurse can also communicate with the home health nurse to collaborate on how to best care for our clients and make adjustments as needed.
Once again we have wonderful home health partners in the Boise Valley who together we can care for and serve clients and patients in Boise, Nampa, Caldwell, Eagle, Meridian, Kuna, Marsing, Homedale, Emmett and sometimes Mountain Home.
