Finding a well-trained, reliable and personable care giver for yourself or for your elderly relative is no easy task, but fortunately, there are many great service providers, either individuals that you find on your own or professionals that you can contact via agencies. Here are some of the things that you need to do and to look for to make sure that the Parker home care giver you hire is indeed someone that you can and want to work with long-term.
Identify Your Requirements
Not all elder care givers provide the same type of services. Some of them provide help with daily chores, such as meal preparation, cleaning, laundry, bathing, shopping and moving around the home safely, while others are trained and licensed to provide more specialized, post-hospitalization or other types of care.
Caregiver services are different in terms of duration as well. You can find service providers for short-term as well as for long-term care, some professionals work full-time and can even move in with the patient permanently, while others are available for shorter periods or for work in shifts.
Finding Candidates
The next step after identifying your requirements is to decide whether you want to search for the right care giver individually or through an agency – both solutions come with pros and cons.
If you turn to an Parker agency, you can be sure that the candidates sent to you have been screened and their backgrounds, licenses and certificates have been checked. Agencies also handle all the tasks related to payroll and scheduling and they can also send you back-up caregivers in case your regular help is temporarily unavailable.
Interviewing Parker home care givers and hiring the most suitable person on your own also comes with benefits, such as the opportunity to talk to more candidates, but you will need to handle the tasks related to employment and payroll on your own as well.
The Qualities to Look for
A good elder care giver is experienced and qualified to provide the type of care that the patient needs, but this is only one out of the many criteria that they should meet. Here are some others:
- The right personality – elderly patients are often difficult to handle, therefore a good elder caregiver needs to be very patient and understanding. The caregiver will spend a lot of time with the patient and some of that time will be spent chatting, therefore it is very important to check whether the caregiver can, indeed, relate to the patient, whether they have common interests;
- Punctuality – elderly people usually like to do things on their own schedule and the care giver should respect that schedule. You also need a care provider that you can rely on, that you can trust to arrive on time, so punctuality is a very important trait to look for;
- Honesty and trustworthiness – the elder care giver will spend a lot of time in the home of the patient, among the elderly patient’s belongings, therefore you need him or her to be completely reliable and trustworthy. To ensure that, check the references provided by the care giver candidate and contact the candidate’s previous employers to ask for their opinions as well.