South Bay agency plans to end home care service

Pathways Home Health and Hospice, a nonprofit home care agency in the South Bay, plans to discontinue a 30-yearold program that provides caregivers to 60 mostly elderly people.

The program sends home aides to residents who need help with daily tasks such as laundry, grocery shopping and housekeeping. About 100 Pathways caregivers will be laid off. Most are per diem workers whose hours fluctuate week to week and who also have jobs elsewhere, said Georgia Rock, Pathways’ chief strategy officer. Pathways, headquartered in Sunnyvale, is not connected to the Pathway Home in Yountville, where a gunman killed three hostages and himself this month. It will continue providing other services for more acute health needs, such as helping patients recover at home after surgery, and endof-life care, to roughly 700 people in Santa Clara County.

The organization, like many local home care agencies, is struggling to find and retain caregivers who can afford to live in the Bay Area, Rock said. At the same time, the need for such care is growing, as many Baby Boomers are reaching an age where they need help in their home in order to continue living independently.

“The whole industry is under stress,” Rock said. “We’ve been having increased difficulty finding caregivers over the last few years. We don’t want

to be taking clients if we can’t staff the shifts.”

Home care is typically paid for by families and individuals themselves, not insurance. Many recipients of home care are seniors who can afford to pay for the service out of their own pocket, while caregivers tend to be on the lower end of the income scale, earning between $15 and $25 an hour, experts estimate. As the Bay Area’s cost of living continues to climb, many caregivers are being priced out of neighborhoods they once lived and worked in, and must commute from far-flung locations, said Dustin Harper of the Institute On Aging, a nonprofit provider of home care services that is absorbing some clients from the Pathways service.

“When the Bay Area had more neighborhoods next to each other, where the lower-income population is not that far from higher-income populations, that makes the matching of those resources a little easier,” said Harper, the institute’s interim vice president of home care and support services. “As folks on the lower-income side are being pushed further and further away from core areas, it makes travel a little more difficult.”