What is a Home Care Agency?

Home care agencies are new, licensed businesses that evaluate and hire caregivers and send them to care for your elderly loved ones. These agencies can provide both medical and non-medical care services. Professionals, such as nurses or nursing assistants, provide medical care. Non-medical care, or in other words personal care or maintenance care, includes assistance with daily living activities, such as preparing food, eating and bathing, which can be provided by people without professional training.

There are many types of care and support services that can be provided at home, from medical care, such as injections, wound care, and vital signs monitoring, to simple aids in daily activities, such as eating, and helping, Bathing, dressing and cleaning. Non-medical caregivers can also assist with activities such as shopping, housework and other chores.

Families can seek care for themselves either through care agencies or seek help directly from independent caregivers without agency mediation.

However, if a family is seeking medical care at home, there is a much greater challenge in finding an independent caregiver who is professionally trained and licensed in medicine because most of the work involves interviewing and evaluating caregivers. In terms of the degree of mastery of the job and morally, it is the responsibility of the families, while the care agencies have already done all these assessments and reviews about their caregivers and there is no need to worry. For this reason, most families tend to use home care agencies for this purpose.

Home care agencies usually have stricter rules for assessing, selecting, and introducing caregivers. But because an independent caregiver can have more flexibility to support the caregiver, this is often the reason families prefer to work with an independent caregiver over a home care agency, for example they can replace light bulbs, go shopping for groceries or take caregivers to a theater or cinema.

With all these explanations, it is generally believed that the quality of care provided by caregivers, whether independent or through an agency, depends entirely on the person who caring for. There are plenty of independent caregivers as well as the caregivers of the home care agencies who provide excellent care and there will be people of both options who offer less care.

The purpose of home care is to allow the client and his or her family to stay safe and as independent as possible. TangelaCare ‘s home care clients are the elderly.

Services provided by TangelaCare include:

Medical Services

Providing medical services by professionals such as: doctors, nurses, assistant nurses, social workers, mental health professionals, occupational therapists and physiotherapists, in the following areas

• Providing professional and durable medical equipment including blood glucose control devices, blood pressure monitors, Eco-cardiograph devices, and wheelchairs
• Drug management, coordination and management of doctors and specialists’ appointments, coordination of ambulance or transportation in order to help them to transfer from home to clinic, hospital or doctor's office and vice versa and so on.

Non-medical Services

Providing non-medical services by professionals such as: Chefs, health care providers and service providers in the following daily chores (These services do not require a doctor's prescription)

• Personal care including: bathing, toilet, lifting, dressing, medication and nutrition
• Home care includes: housekeeping, cooking and laundry
• And accompanying care including: shopping, transportation, talking and entertaining the elderly and etc.