Welcome everyone to the Wellsprings Home Care Podcast. Once again, I’m your host Justin Currie, and as always, I’m here with my two four legged co-hosts Goose and Remington.
Now on today’s podcast, we’re going to be discussing a little bit about Home Care in Downingtown. First off, I just wanted to let you know a little bit about Wellsprings and who we are. We’re located in Exton, Pennsylvania. We’ve been around for about two and a half years now and one of the things we’re really excited to announce is that SeniorAdvisor.com actually gave us one of the 2020 best of home care awards this year. So what that is, is we made it into the top 2 to 3% of home care providers nationwide. So that’s something we’re really proud of and we’re really excited about. And we’re just so grateful to have such a just incredible team out here in Downingtown. We couldn’t be more excited about it and we look forward to aiming for the same goal in 2021.
I wanted to get in to a little bit about what types of services Wellsprings offers in Downingtown. Some of the home care services in Downingtown would include:
Personal Care Services: Those are things like helping out with the activities of daily living which is essentially helping out with like bathing, toileting, ambulating around the home – things that you need to do on a daily basis.
Live-In Care: That’s somewhat synonymous with 24 hour care. Live-In care is actually where the caregiver comes in and they stay overnight. They’ll actually be set up with a bedroom and they’ll live there full time when they’re on shift. And in comparison, 24 hour care is actually where there’s going to be two to three shifts every 24 hours, so that means that the caregiver is going to have to stay alert and active the entire time. There’s no sleeping allowed so it’s a little bit more expensive. The Live-In Care is the more economical option. But if someone is up several times during the night, usually 24 hour care is a requirement.
Dementia Care and Alzheimer’s Care: So all of our caregivers are actually specially trained in house with Dementia Care certifications and Alzheimer’s certifications so we’re very experienced when working with patients with any sort of memory lost all different stages.
Companionship: Whether that be in person or remotely, we do a lot of telephone calls as well for companionship purposes for medication reminders and just overall safety checks.
Veterans care: So we work with a lot of veterans. We have partnerships with certain individuals that can help out with veteran benefits and there’s no cost, no charge to do that. Basically, they’re paid by the veterans administration. So if you think you might qualify, definitely get in touch with us and we can see if we can get you qualified for a bannock fit that will actually pay for pay for some home care services for you.
Respite care: So with respite care, that’s essentially when maybe a family member is caring for a loved one and they just need a break from time to time. Maybe they’re doing it seven days a week and they need somebody to just come in and help out. That was where respite would come in, where one of our caregivers could actually come in and just help out for a day, whether it be a day, a week or two days a week, we can come in and just sort of provide that little bit of a break for the family care giver.
Mobility Assistance: With mobility assistance, we do everything from a full transfer assist where sometimes you might need two caregivers in to do a full transfer to just sort of stand by assist. So if you’re scared of somebody having a fall, maybe they use a walker to get around and they’re a little unsure of their balance, maybe they just came out of skilled nursing or rehabilitation and they’re just sort of unsure of their balance so we can really come in and help out and monitor at all times, especially when they’re ambulating around the home. But just to ensure that we can prevent any falls moving forward.
Wellsprings Home Care is actually very active in the community in Downingtown. So we help out with the Downingtown area Senior Center, which is a really great spot for socialization for doing activities, they can provide meals, and we partner with them. We come in and actually we’ll play bingo with the residents and just sort of hang out with them for a bit and get to know them a little bit better and just helping out any way we can. Some of the other things we do in the community, is we work with a lot of skilled nursing facilities, a lot of assisted living facilities in Downingtown and we’ll go in and volunteer. We’ll obviously offer home care services as well. We have home care aides within those communities that can help out. It’s not just at home that they can help, they can also go to any nursing facility or assisted living facility in Downingtown.
We actually have a really fun photo booth. We call it the Senior Snaps photo booth and it’s fully accessible to those with wheelchairs sitting down, or standing up and the residents in the communities and the patients in the skilled nursing facilities, they can actually come in and take fun and goofy photos. We have photo props there as well and they can come in and get some good memories with their family. A lot of them will come in and they’re very resistant to start out with, but it’s, kind of funny to see as things progress. We can’t get them out of there by the end. We provide them with photos with a backdrop on them that’s something that they can really create a good memory and maybe hang up in their room in the future.
Our caregivers actually all reside within 10 miles of Downingtown. We have a lot of caregivers that work out of Coatesville, Downingtown, West Chester – so we have a big group of caregivers in the area and so they offer a lot of coverage for our clients. We rarely ever have somebody that doesn’t make it into work where we can’t cover it. Obviously emergencies and things like that come up but just because we have a so many caregivers in the area, there’s always somebody willing and able to step in and help out and do a great job.
Our caregivers are also trained and screened as per PA Regulations and requirements, but we actually go over and above that when screening our caregivers as well. The PA regulation requires that you have TB testing (which is tuberculosis testing), you have criminal background checks and there’s a few other little things in there that PA state requires but we actually go over and above that. We do full social security verifications, we do annual drug testing on all of our employees, we do full competency tests, HIPAA testing and we really go over and above when screening our caregivers. And that’s so we can avoid any issues down the road. We want to make sure that who we’re bringing into to our clients in Downingtown, they have somebody that they’re really comfortable with and it can be a long enjoyable relationship.
So once again, if anyone’s looking for home care services in Downingtown, Wellsprings Home Care can definitely help out. We have a lot of really highly skilled caregivers in the area.
We’ll do a full needs assessment for our clients where we take that information and that’s when we screen our caregivers and try and find the right match for you. And in general, most of our clients, they would like to meet the caregiver prior to service and we can arrange that as well just to make sure that you know who’s coming into your home and you’re comfortable with who is coming in there and we’ll also provide follow-ups to that as well. Maybe the caregiver comes in for one or two shifts, we’ll follow up with you right away just to make sure that it’s going to be a match. We’re obviously not going to put somebody in there that doesn’t have the right experience level or there’s a personality mismatch. We are always going to be monitoring that just to ensure that there’s 100% comfort level there. So that’s about all I have for today for home care in Downingtown. It’s always great of you to stop by and I look forward to seeing you again soon. Thanks a lot.
