In-home care eases aging
Nonmedical, medical assistance agencies help seniors with day-to-day chores, prolong their independence
Henry and Louise Gallegos enjoy their two caregivers. who split the week to help with laundry, housekeeping, cooking, grocery shopping and walks.
The caregivers leave notes or send texts to each other if there is a concern to be addressed on the next shift. The collaboration has allowed the Gallegoses to stay in the Northeast Heights home they have lived in since 1967.
In-home assistance, either medical or nonmedical in nature, increasingly helps Albuquerque elders age in their own homes, says Mary Martinez, franchise/owner of the local Home Instead Senior Care agency. “When you can help senior citizens stay in their homes and provide them with care for day-to-day chores and independence, that’s a good business to have in the community,” she said.
The franchise Martinez runs serves seniors in the Albuquerque area, helping them with light housekeeping, cooking, errands, grooming and dressing, medication reminders and sometimes just some simple companionship. While geared to a residential setting, Home Instead also has caregivers going to skilled-nursing facilities and rehab hospitals to offer “sitter services,” especially for residents with dementia who are at risk of wandering, Martinez said.
Companies like Martinez’s are on the front end of a trend that shows no sign of abating. The number of Americans requiring help with daily living at home is expected to more than double from the current 12 million to 27 million by 2050, according to Right at Home, an international franchise organization.
“This whole approach to care has really blown up in the past 20 years,” Martinez said of the elders who not only are more conscientious about staying healthy but also have no desire to go into a nursing home or assisted-care facility if it isn’t medically necessary.
“People do better in an
environment they are comfortable with,” said Martinez, who studied gerontology in college. She said nursing homes are useful for skilled care, but she saw a need to give seniors more options when she worked as a case manager for the state of New Mexico. She often heard families say they wish they didn’t have to put Mom or Dad in a home. And, Mom or Dad didn’t want to give up their possessions and what’s most familiar to them, she says.
The franchise is one of several senior aid companies in town, such as Visiting Angels and Right at Home. The local Home Instead has been operating for 20 years. Martinez has been the owner for 16 years.
The cost of care
Professional home healthcare assistance, though not as expensive as nursing homes and assisted-living facilities, can be still be costly. Even the nonmedical costs can add up each month, especially if the person requires round-the-clock care, according to Genworth Financial, a long-term care insurance provider.
According to Genworth, the average cost of assisted living is $3,628 per month, and the average cost of nursing-home care is $6,844 per month for a semiprivate room.
Home health care and nonmedical care providers typically charge by the hour. Martinez, for example, requires a minimum three-hour commitment from a client at a rate of $21.95 per hour.
For-profit home health agencies like Home Instead rely on long-term care insurance and clients’ personal funds to operate, Martinez said.
Martinez said few of her clients require round-the-clock care because spouses, siblings and children step in after hours to provide support at home and frequently lend financial support to keep Mom, Dad or Grandma at home.
Training, monitoring
New Mexico doesn’t license or monitor nonmedical homecare groups, so the quality of caregivers is at the discretion of the hiring agency.
With 300-plus clients, including 100 elderly veterans, Martinez has a workforce of 220 caregivers, most of them with extensive experience. All of them go through background checks and an eight-hour training period specific to the company and are carefully matched with clients, she said. It is largely
a part-time staff, she said, including a few homemakers needing to pick up some work while the kids are in school, empty nesters who took care of Mom and Grandma, and even a few college students.
The caregivers, a few of whom are men, are conversant in body mechanics to move people safely, get trained in personal care and become familiar with conditions such as Alzheimer’s and difficult behaviors. In addition, they receiving ongoing educational training.
While the average home health turnover rate is about 60 percent each year, “Several employees have been with us for 10 years,” Martinez said.
Martinez looks for caring, compassionate people to work in her business, recruiting employees as if they were looking after her own parents — because they are.
“My parents are also my clients,” Martinez said of the Gallegoses, both of whom are in their late 70s. Louise is suffering from dementia, and Henry, who is still pretty spry, is the primary caregiver after 6 p.m.
Martinez and her siblings are in close contact with their parents after the caregivers leave. “The furnace may not be working and we get a call,” she said. “They still rely on us.”
While Home Instead focuses on nonmedical home care, some clients need skilled nursing services in a home setting, such as the suite of services provided by FootPrints Home Care Inc.
The founders came together from a variety of backgrounds, said Gary Oppedahl, a serial entrepreneur, former Intel executive and now economic development director for the city of Albuquerque. He helped launch the business for purely personal reasons.
More than a decade ago, he discovered how difficult it was to find reliable home health care for his mother, who was suffering from cancer. “She was deathly afraid of a going to a nursing home, so my dad and I took turns caring for her,” said Oppedahl, who pulled the night shift for eight months before his mom entered hospice care. The experience “took us away from just being just a husband and a son,” Oppedahl said of the dynamic that occurs in a family when a child, parent or spouse needs round-the-clock caregiving.
Sometimes the role reversal is overwhelming. “Not everybody can be there on such a personal level,” Oppedahl said. “I was hearing the same thing from friends and acquaintances who were at their wits’ ends, either trying to care for parents in their free time or struggling to find consistent, trained nonmedical caregivers” they could trust.
In 2005, the five founders started their home care company out of Oppedahl’s garage in Corrales. It has since grown to a business that generates $6.5 million in revenue and employs 200 people. The business specializes in placing licensed nursing care professionals and nonmedical caregivers for clients ranging from infants to seniors.
Medicaid pays for some services under home and community-based waiver programs, Oppedahl said. For the nonmedical caregiving component, about a quarter of the company’s clients pay with personal funds. Long-term care insurance also provides a revenue stream.
Oppedahl, who stepped back from an active role in the company in 2012, forecasts the company hitting the $10 million revenue mark in the next couple of years, primarily because of the expansion of services to serve medically fragile children in Santa Fe and other parts of the state.