How is home care?

JustBeachyNurse, LPN · May 20, 2017

In my state CNAs can't work in home care unless they take the CHHA bridge and get CHHA credential. Homecare aides are assistance with daily living: toiketibg, dressing, bathing, meal prep, shopping, assist on errands

caliotter3 · May 20, 2017

Do some reading in the home health and "private duty" forums to get an idea of what home care patients are like. They don't treat home health aides much differently than they treat home care nurses. The biggest difference is working with one patient at a time, for a limited amount of time, during the work day. This can be viewed as an advantage or a disadvantage.

stevemac · May 21, 2017

I'm an ER nurse, and my wife is a veteran Home Health nurse. Prior to nursing I was a Paramedic. I mention it because I definitely understand your affinity for Emergency care, and because I lived with "house calls" and with a nurse who does do what you're thinking of doing.

After nursing school, I rode along with my wife for a day. Married for 15 years at that point, and she'd been a home health nurse almost that long, and that was my first time seeing her "in motion" so to speak. I had responded to calls for her patients where she happened to be the home health nurse on scene, but then I was focused on the call and not on how she works.

After spending the day with her, this was my impression: Home Health seemed a lot like a 911 call, but with NO stress.

My wife is excellent at building relationships with her patients and their families, which is an asset in out-of-hospital care that is hard to explain quickly. (I benefit from it sometimes, because some of her patients send food home with her!)

If you like providing care based on relationships instead of answering call lights, you might really like home health care. You'll likely have housekeeping duties and ADLs to assist your patients with, like many facility-based CNAs have, but you will have much more time with each patient and fewer patients.

My wife's hardest client to date has been a lady who was my wife's age, and our son and her son were in the same class. My wife was doing Hospice as well as Home Health at that time, and that client had terminal cancer. It hit very close to home for my wife and was hard for her.

More recently she had a patient that proved to be hard for ME! The patient was discharged from Home Health (no longer needed in-home care), and so that ended my weekly supply of some kind of oriental food that guy's wife always made for the days that my wife visited them.

I was sad.