Medical and Non Medical Home Care

Home care services can be divided in two major groups and these are medical and non medical services.This is why you will find various services provide a different professional to provide the care. It is important that you realise that all care givers are trained to provide some form of medical assistance and could even help the patient when it comes to medical emergencies. Today, we will distinguish the different services you can get in the medical and non medical categories.

We first begin with nursing care which as the name suggests is provided by a nurse and this is usually a registered nurse. When it comes to nursing care, you can get services such as aged care, diabetes services, continence management, haemophilia care, hospital liaison, dementia care, wound care and other medical services. As you can see, these are services that require medical care and nobody would ideally feel comfortable having a non medical professional providing such services. That is really something that you need to look out for when employing the services of any home care agency. Medical services must be provided my medically trained professionals such as nurses, physiotherapists and others.

Non-medical services could be in form of personal care and companionship as well. Personal care is often provided for people who are unable to care for themselves this could be due to age, recent incapacitation or maybe recovery from an illness or surgery. Whatever the case, personal care services are a great way to give your loved one the support they need. Some of the personal care services you can get include: feeding assistance, toileting or incontinence care, dressing, bathing, mobility and more. When it comes to companionship and care services, we are looking at someone who does not necessarily need medical care and mainly requires a companion. Companions provide tasks such as mail assistance, assistance with light housekeeping, grocery shopping, meal preparation, grooming and basically someone who is there to not only care for you but also provide conversation.

Home care does not necessarily have to be live-in care and you could have the care provider come for scheduled visits. However, people who need personal care tend to require live-in care since they are not in a position to care for themselves as needed. Different services will call for different kinds of health professionals and these are some of the professionals you are bound to come across when you require in-home care.Nurses are most common and as mentioned earlier they primarily provide medical care and will more often than not liaise with the hospital or your doctor to monitor and ensure that you are recovering as should. Other professionals who also provide medical care are medical social workers and they are mainly hired to counsel and assist the family and patient to cope with emotional and social factors that affect people with dire medical conditions or recent disability. Homemakers, health aides, companions and family caregivers are often provided when the situation is not dire and mainly non medical.