The next time, you or someone you know, is shopping around for a good home health care agency or nurse registry, be sure to choose a local provider. Here is an analysis of why this is important and how these issues can affect you.

• The home health care profession relies on its caregivers to travel to each patient’s residence. The further away the home care office location is from your home, the less likely that agency will have caregivers that live close to you. Typically, a home health agency or nurse registry cannot successfully recruit caregivers who live more than fifteen to twenty miles away.
• The best reason for doing business with an agency, versus hiring someone on your own, is the immediate availability of a wide selection of qualified caregivers. Local agencies will have the largest supply of local caregivers. In addition, if you have an emergency that causes you to need help immediately, a local provider is your best bet.
• If you need a caregiver to provide you with transportation, then you defiantly want someone who is familiar with the city in which you live. Otherwise, every trip to the grocery store or the physician’s office may have needless delays. Local home care agencies have the advantage of recruiting local caregivers.
• Nurses and nurse’s aides do not like to commute great distances to get to a client’s home. (Just like most workers!) As mentioned above, it is difficult to get a caregiver to travel more than fifteen miles one way to reach the job. Sometimes, a caregiver will, out of immediate necessity, agree to take a job with a long commute. Nevertheless, most caregivers will quit that job when a closer job becomes available. From the patient’s point of view, this means having to change caregivers and train new caregivers. This can be very stressful on patients and their families!
• Unfortunately, many nurse’s aides are likely to drive older model cars that use more gas and require more repairs. The number one reason for an aide to cancel a job without notice is auto breakdown. Obviously, long commutes only compound these problems. The result for the patient could be unreliable help.

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