Respite care refer to temporary or intermittent care-giving services that are procured so that the usual caregivers of a patient can be given rest.
The elderly, people with serious injuries, the disabled, or those with long term medical conditions often require family member to be their caregivers inside and outside the home.
These daily activities of taking care of loved ones can be tiring even though they come from a voluntary act of love.
Everybody needs a break or some type of short term relief from time to time.
Respite care are services that provide nurses or well-trained caregivers to take care of those who need assistance so that the usually caregivers (e.g. family members) can take a break and recharge while having peace of mine that their loved ones are being cared for.
For this reason respite care are usually short term arrangements or intermittently.
When long term care is required, people are often referred to a nursing home or other types of specialist care facilities that better meet their needs.
Saying that, sometimes patients who require short term care after being discharged from hospitalization choose to go with respite care services rather than admitting into a medical center.
Some of the tasks that people can expect the staff of respite services to do include:
- Cooking and meal preparation
- Nutritional value planning
- Showering and toileting
- Companionship
- Medication reminders
- Laundry
- Transport
- Massage therapy
- etc
It is also not uncommon for people to drop off sufferers at respite care facilities in the morning, go to work like they regularly do, and pick them up in the evening after work.
Sort of like dropping off a child with childcare services.
Only this time, it is for a person who is unable to perform ADLs and needs the assistance of caregivers.
Weekend respite care is also getting more common as families travel with no one home to care for an elderly.
It is important to note that a hospice also provide short term care to patients. But are catered to those who are terminally ill.
Respite care services
Service providers that provide respite care basically operate in two ways.
- At a nursing facility
- Mobile caregivers that go to where they are required
Both are uniquely different in the way they deliver their services.
They can also classify their services as planned respite and emergency respite.
The former being a planned service requirement, and the latter being a sudden urgent need for service due to unexpected events.
Nursing home care facilities
Those that provide services at their own facilities are often nursing centers that take care of sufferers on a intermittent basis.
This is partly because their facilities are of greater importance for those who require nursing attention more severely than others.
For this reason, many such facility care centers usually have a minimum period of stay that one has to be admitted for, and a maximum stay period too.
This registers a guest long enough to make economic sense, while not staying long enough to be categorized as long-term guests.
A minimum period might be 7 days, and a maximum period might be 30 days with evaluation should extension be requested.
A guest would usually be initially attended to by professionals like doctors, physiotherapists, registered nurses, etc, for assessment before caregivers take over.
And because of the high demand and long waiting list for such services, some would only be willing to accept new guests with referral letters from doctors, possibly from a primary care physician.
Some won’t accept those who are completely immobile and only accept those who are semi-mobile.
Admission eligibility criteria depends from operator to operator.
It could also be very costly for households to send family members to specialist care centres when such medical facilities are not really required.
This is also why mobile caregivers are usually more popular with customers.
Mobile caregivers
Mobile caregivers don’t have a fixed location in which they serve and pretty much goes to wherever their expert services are needed, this can include the main office of the business too.
They can also make their way to nursing homes or senior care centers.
But they usually make their way into the homes of clients and charge on an hourly basis or daily basis.
So for example, if it is really not convenient, or even hazardous, to transfer an injured person from home to a care-giving establishment, then mobile respite care offers the ideal scenario of having well-trained caregivers arrive at the house of the injured to take care of him or her.
There is no need for instance, to arrange for the logistics requirements of someone that is suffering from seriously bad injuries.
An elderly person who has fallen sick but household members being unable to commit time to care for him or her, can also benefit from mobile caregivers.
However, this can also come with drawbacks.
The biggest concern for such mobile services is the matter of safety and security when a stranger is allowed into the house. This is especially so when there is no one home except the family member who requires care.
For this reason, respite care often serves a market niche where there are people at home but none of them are confident of providing the require care that a sufferer needs.
Thus even though there are people at home, mobile caregivers are hired to provide the necessary quality of care.
For example, some people might be too afraid of needles to take on the responsibility of helping a recovering family member with his or her injections.
Respite care insurance
Most basic insurance policies don’t provide any coverage that respite care expenses can be claimed from.
Even other types of policies might not specifically mention respite care in their list of benefits and coverage areas.
But it is indirectly covered in some features of policies like disability insurance and long term care insurance. And policies with cash benefits such as an amount of money per day for an inability to go to work.
The concern is that if they are stated very clearly, people might use respite services unnecessarily and make claims for reimbursement.
When in doubt, do check with your insurance agent about how your policies or policies of a loved one provide coverage for respite care services.
