Why do you like home care? What are the advantages?

Specialties Home Health

Published

I am reading through the threads and I see more negative than positive working in home care. Why do you continue to work in the home care field? I am curious.

I'm excited to join HH!! Just hired on starting per diem. I would love to go FT but afraid of the pay because of census. I am a FT school nurse working per diem at a sub acute facility as well. I would love to go FT HH and stay per diem at the sub acute facility. For those HH nurses,...I know that if you don't get a visit means no $$ but are you living pay check to pay check?? I'm afraid to let go of my steady FT school nurse position (has benefits with 10 sick/personal use days but no holiday pay!! So i go a total 2 months without pay=(...). I already know I will love HH but I am the breadwinner and have two small children and not sure if i can take a chance at my income shrinking. Any input or Advice is appreciated!!!

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I'm excited to join HH!! Just hired on starting per diem. I would love to go FT but afraid of the pay because of census. I am a FT school nurse working per diem at a sub acute facility as well. I would love to go FT HH and stay per diem at the sub acute facility. For those HH nurses,...I know that if you don't get a visit means no $$ but are you living pay check to pay check?? I'm afraid to let go of my steady FT school nurse position (has benefits with 10 sick/personal use days but no holiday pay!! So i go a total 2 months without pay=(...). I already know I will love HH but I am the breadwinner and have two small children and not sure if i can take a chance at my income shrinking. Any input or Advice is appreciated!!!

Home health, either intermittent visit or extended care, does not offer job security. Best to keep any other employment in place. Extended care home health nurses usually sign on with more than one case and/or more than one agency, to mitigate those times when they can not work. When doing visit type home health, salaried, rather than pay per visit, offers security, but often comes with its own set of disadvantages, such as an increasing expected workload.

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Specializes in cardiac/education.
Home health or hospice are great positions for nurses who have grown weary and burned out by the aggravating and thankless routine of 8, 10, or 12 hour shifts in acute care basically babysitting, waitressing, and placating demented, drug-seeking, or non-compliant patients. Imagine, you see a patient for an hour, document right after the visit on the computer in your car, in their home, or in the ALF; take lunch when and where you want, drive from place to place in the comfort of your own car; and not have to deal with hospital drama and politics. If you enjoy working alone and solving problems without having to be told what to do all the time, then home health is the job for you. Also, not having ancillaries and medical doctors sitting in your spot, hogging the charts, making the nurse get lab results, really making the nurse do freaking EVERYTHING for God's sake!!...is a welcome relief. And how does not having to hunt down your CNA to help you change yet another code brown sound to you? How about not having to remind your CNA to do vitals again at hour four? No meals to serve to ungrateful patients who expect gourmet food, no pills to watch them take one by one by one, no narcotics to give slow iv push several times per shift, no call lights blaring, no useless intakes and outputs to record, no phones ringing non-stop, no family members arriving at all hours of the day and night, no butt-kissing of family members because the hospital wants all the money and no bad publicity; and not being stuck in a stuffy environment all day and feeling like you made the wrong decision by becoming a nurse. Nothing to me is more depressing than taking care of 5-6 annoying patients in the same place day after day and waiting for the oncoming nurse to arrive so you can give report and run for the elevator. And giving report is the worst--God forbid if the oncoming nurse has to actually do work. I would not take a job as a nurse in an acute care hospital setting again unless i could not find another home health/hospice situation. And i would desperately try first to obtain an outpatient surgery, urgent care, cardiac cath, or endoscopy job first. I am stuck being a nurse, but there is absolutely no reason for me to have a horrible job that i dread going to. After 16 years of hospital nursing i believe i deserve that much.

Why is it that it took you 16 years to feel this way but I feel this way after only a little over a year!??? Thank you for your insight on HH, it really is an area i'd like to get my feet wet in. Can't wait to actually talk to patients AND be able to listen!

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I have also been working in a SNF for a year now and agree that it is very challenging to complete all your tasks and safely care for 25+ patients at one time. I am considering venturing out into the home health world. My main concern is safety- certain neighborhoods and certain houses etc., but am very much longing for 1:1 patient care. Thanks for posting this!

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Specializes in O.R. and Home Health.

I am fairly new to home health. I am a former scrub tech turned RN. I got tired of all the bullying, harassment, etc which can be found in hospital settings. So I found a smaller home health agency and signed up. I work night shift due to sciatica. Moving from a unionized hospital to a small home health agency I took about a $10 cut in pay. some may find that alarming. However, I LOVE IT!! No one breathing down my neck, I can properly assess the patient, discuss client care with the on coming shift or the clinical director who is available by phone or text. I can work as much or little as I want. I have 3 clients and 2 of them are about 24 and 20 miles from my home. The 3rd is 4 miles. It's true that you don't work if your client is hospitalized or dies, but I enjoy the slower pace. I'm doing care you usually don't see on a regular basis like trach's, ventilators, colostomy bags, urostomys, Hoyer lifts etc. I am a valued member of a team. That is what I like about home health. Believe me when I say that the cut in pay is worth not coming into work and putting up with a shark pool. I hate snarky (shark +snarly) nurses who make other people look bad so they look better, not to mention the hospital politics etc.

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