What’s the Difference Between Home Care Services and Private Caregivers?

If you’re considering keeping your senior loved one at home while they receive professional care, you have two choices. You can hire a private caregiver to care for them, or you can work with a home health care agency which provides you with a caregiver. The distinction may seem small, but it’s very important and changes your obligations to that provider of elderly home care.

What’s Involved with Hiring a Private Caregiver?

If you choose to a hire a private caregiver for your parent or other senior loved one, you are technically an employer. This means that you’re responsible for the tax implications, worker’s compensation insurance, and other obligations that an employer has to their employee. Most people do not understand what it takes to hire a person and under what circumstances they can be let go.

Hiring a private caregiver is also less flexible than choosing an agency. You need to give your caregiver full-time or at least part-time work, even if your senior does not need that much support. Further, the person you hire may not have all the skills you need or will need in the future. If your parent currently needs an hour of nursing care a week, or will in the future, hiring a full-time nurse may be simply too expensive.

However, hiring someone who isn’t a nurse may mean your loved one doesn’t get all the support they need. Rare is the private caregiver who can cook, clean, provide medical care, fix a leaky faucet, and specialize in the specific health problems your senior loved one has.

For these reasons, most families are better off choosing an agency to provide home health care.

Why Choose an Agency?

In contrast, when you choose an elderly home care agency, you don’t have to worry about hiring, firing, or checking out the qualifications of your home care provider. The agency will provide all of that. Neither do you have to sign up for full-time care. Instead, you can pick and choose the services you need.

Typically, a disadvantage of choosing an agency to care for your senior loved one is that multiple people may be involved in their care. However, as part of iCare Home Health premier home care services, we can provide your loved one with a consistent caregiver. Further, we carefully match your parent to one of our caregivers, to be sure their personalities will work together.

Learn more about why you should choose iCare Home Health for premier home care services below.