Help that isn’t so Helpful

So we are lucky enough to have a great amount of help taking care of Mom.  She was a very smart lady and thought ahead and purchased long term care (LTC) insurance so the cost of most of her care is covered by this.  However this still does not make things simple.

We activated Mom’s LTC insurance in Jan ’10.  We should have done it earlier.  Turns out they said she qualified back in Jan ’09. If I had been willing to admit that things were as bad as they were we could have had help for eight hours a day in our home completely free for that entire year.  When we went out of town for vacation we could have even paid a little to have someone stay here instead of all hell breaking loose like it did.  I do regret not activating it sooner.

What we ended up doing was getting home caregiver services to help out for a few hours every other day while we were on vacation because we didn’t know if this would be paid for.  Before that we were doing everything on our own.  Big mistake in that it led to major stress.  The upside was we got to spend A LOT of time with mom – taking her to all the appointments, physical therapy etc.  When we finally did start using caregivers we began to get a taste of what a MESS home care agencies are.  Basically you contact an agency – of which there are a plethora in any large city – and they come out to do an “assessment” to see what your loved one needs/wants help with.  They put together a “care plan” and then you decide how many hours you want help (typically there is a minimum of two hours per time they come out), when and give them a down payment.  You do all of this with a nurse or other administrative person from the agency.  THEN they attempt to find a caregiver to work with your loved one.  This means that essentially they send out their spiffiest people and have you sign up but you don’t know exactly who you are going to have actually helping you in the home.  You don’t know who will be bathing your loved one, wiping their butt, spending all day with them etc.  If it’s a good company they come over a bit early on the first day – the administrator and the actual caregiver you are being assigned – and do an introduction before work.  If they aren’t as great they just send over Helpful Henrietta or whomever to go to work. Sometimes they check up on how things are going, other times they just send you a bill for the services and don’t bug you unless you call them.  Oh yeah and the markup between what they charge you and what they actually pay the caregiver can be huge.  For example in our city a caregiver could make between $9-$13 per hour and the client is being charged $23-$27 per hour.  From what I have seen these agencies are really making some good cash.  If it’s a crummy agency then oftentimes the caregiver will have little experience, may not be able to communicate in understandable English, and may not even be given details of the job beforehand.

Why do I know all of this?  Because since the beginning of Feb we have gone through THREE different home care agencies and at least ELEVEN – yes 11 caregivers.  Granted out of those 11 we have two consistently working for us.

We’ve had caregivers not show up, show up an hour late, forget to take my mom to a blood draw appointment, drop her on the commode causing a huge bruise, say “I’m not a maid” (when part of the job involves housekeeping), ask to leave when they were supposed to be on duty, ask if they could have me sign off on their volunteer hours for diversion and I don’t even know what else.  And that doesn’t even begin to mention how our most current caregiver seems to be getting stressed out because —– my mom is sick.  um yeah.

If you are going to be a caregiver and work with hospice patients please don’t get annoyed and impatient when things get worse with their condition.

That is all.

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