Is home health care the best solution?
When a patient needs support recovering from an illness, surgery or injury, it can be confusing to know where to turn.
We hear time and time again about a medical provider referring patients to a skilled nursing facility to recover from an illness, injury or surgery. In some cases, this may be the best option for that patient - but, oftentimes, we can advocate on a patient’s behalf to keep that patient in his/her home.
Research shows that when it comes to physical and mental well-being, there is no place like home for healing and recovery.
There is no doubt that physicians and medical providers have their patient’s best interests at heart, but on occasion, we find medical professionals who simply do not understand how vast our skilled home care services really are. This is at no fault of the provider; they cannot possibly understand the ins and outs of home health care like we do, as they don’t live it every day like we do.
We employ a robust team of clinicians, therapists, nurses, aides, case managers and home care professionals to ensure every patient need is met. If there is a need we cannot meet, such as custodial care, we will coordinate that care on your behalf to help facilitate and easy and stress-free process.
We’d like to share an example with you. We discovered a situation in which an amputee desperately wanted to return to home after surgery, but his physician would only write an order for him to enter a skilled nursing facility. We learned his friends and family made modifications to his home to provide a safe return, and we were able to provide not only the medical support he needed for in-home recovery, but also coordinated custodial care to help him readjust to daily life. We advocated for this patient to return home and identified a physician who would write the order for home health care services once he learned of the pieces put in place to ensure the patient’s safety and well-being. Thankfully, because this patient saw his neighbor benefit from home health care , he knew to advocate for himself and request home health care services - at the end of the day, he knew in-home recovery was the best solution for him. From there, we advocated on his behalf to safely bring him home for recovery. If it is safe for a patient to recover at home, we’ll do everything we can to advocate for that patient to do so if they desire.
OUR COMMITMENT
to every potential patient is this:
If a patient’s desire is to recover at home, we’ll do everything we can to make an in-home recovery a safe reality, and we’ll advocate to eliminate or minimize any financial burden to the patient.
What if a medical provider says home health care isn't appropriate?
Here are some questions you can ask the medical provider:
Insert question here.
Insert question here.
Insert question here.
We navigate these care decisions every day, so please call our office and let one of our nurse navigators help by talking through your situation. If the desire is to remain home, we’ll do everything we can to make that a safe reality for you/your loved one. If it’s not safe to remain home, we will not recommend it and will share continued care options with you.
