Home Care vs. Home Health Care in Boerne

Home care is non-medical. It is help with daily living, bathing, meals, housekeeping, transport and company, provided by trained caregivers, arranged directly by the family, and usually paid for privately. It can run for years.

Home health care is clinical. It is skilled nursing or therapy delivered under a physician's orders by a licensed home health agency, provided in short intermittent visits, and often billed to Medicare or insurance when strict criteria are met. It is designed to end.

A typical sequence after a hip fracture: the hospital discharges your mother with home health orders. A nurse visits twice a week, a physical therapist three times. That accounts for perhaps five hours out of one hundred and sixty-eight.

For the other one hundred and sixty-three she still needs help getting to the bathroom at night, showering, eating properly and getting to follow-up appointments. That is home care, and it is why the two so often run in parallel.

When the home health episode ends, and it will, the daily need frequently does not. Families who planned for that transition in advance manage it far better than families who discover it on the last visit.