Your 82-year-old mother falls in the shower and breaks her hip.
After a couple of weeks in the hospital, she is well enough to return home. But she can’t move around as easily as she did before the fall, and you worry that she could hurt herself again.
She lives too far away for you to spend as much time with her as you think she needs.
Do you consider home nursing care at $75 an hour or more? Does your mom want to move in with you? Does she want to move to an assisted-living facility or a nursing home?
For about $7 an hour, she can get 24-hour live-in care through Aegin Place, a Colorado-based home companion care company started five years ago. The company recently sold its Denver unit to focus on franchising new offices for $25,000 apiece, said Zach Sahker, the owner.
Home and community-based service programs increasingly are popular with people who decide they’d prefer not to move from their primary residences, which they’ve labored most of their lives to acquire and furnish.
Sahker continues to help clients in other parts of Colorado, Utah and New Mexico. He vets independent contractors to live with elderly clients around the clock to help them with such basic needs as cooking and showering.
An estimated 50 percent of all adults in the United States will need some sort of long-term care at some point, Sahker said. Aegin Place believes it can help about half of them.
“It’s a huge need,” Sahker said. “Many of them will go to nursing homes, and they could be at home with us.”
As baby boomers and their parents get older, the need for all home help services – not just 24-hour care – has skyrocketed, said Alan Heileman, owner of one of three Denver Comfort Keepers offices. Comfort Keepers, which offers hourly home care, was started after a nurse in Dayton, Ohio, realized she was getting numerous requests for help with such things as shopping and cleaning from the people she visited in their homes.
“We claim to be an affordable alternative to going to a nursing home,” Heileman said. “But if you have to have paid care around the clock, it gets pricey no matter how you do it.”
Sahker said he keeps his prices low by hiring people as independent contractors at about $100 a day plus room and board, making about 25-30 percent in profit. He spends extra time on a 17-page background check to match caregivers with clients and sends a registered nurse on periodic visits to his clients’ homes to check for bedsores, to make sure they’re not being abused and to check that they’re eating properly.
An assisted-living program costs about $2,500 a month for room and board to up to $6,000 a month when personal care such as help with bathing and eating is added, Sahker said.
“If people hire someone off the street, once they move in, it’s hard to get them out,” Sahker said. “It’s nice to have an agency in the middle to manage them.”
So many families are looking for such nonmedical help for elderly relatives that Sahker was overwhelmed a couple of years ago when he advertised his service on the radio.
“I saw a void in care, and I saw what people were wanting in their lives. It’s relatively new to approach it this way, and that’s what makes it unique,” Sahker said. “I can give better care, and people want to stay at home.”
Heileman agrees. Moving is stressful at any time in a person’s life, but it’s especially stressful for older people, he said. Comfort Keepers has Colorado offices in Denver, Colorado Springs, Grand Junction, Boulder and Fort Collins.
“Generally, the way people use our services is they have us come in during the day to help out Mom or Dad, and they can stay there at night,” Heileman said.
Most clients first start needing help with things such as housekeeping and cooking as they get older, Heileman said.
“People tell us they can’t keep up with the house anymore. They can’t strip the beds, and they can’t vacuum. There’s no reason they have to leave,” Heileman said. “But if you do have dementia, you have to go somewhere where you’re safe and have a higher level of care.”
