Adult Family Homes offer various benefits over other care options and I wanted to get into the ones we’ve personally experienced through our clients a family testimonials about their individual experiences.
Quality of Care
There is nothing quite like hearing the joy of a family member who can’t believe the difference they’ve seen in their loved one since moving into an Adult Family Home.
A huge improvement in their mental health, becoming healthier and happier through nutrition, stronger and more mobile through exercise and just experience a dramatic increase in their quality of life. This is to me the magic that a good Adult Family Home can provide to their residents.
After experiencing what is often neglect in larger facilities, often no fault of the caregivers themselves, just the way they are run that overburdens caregivers with far too many clients to properly care for them, seeing a loved on receive the sort of warmth, love and individual care that an Adult Family Home can offer is a breath of fresh air.
With up to just 8 residents in an Adult Family Home and most being 6 or less, the AFH is able to offer far more personalized care and attention to each of their residents.
The staff are usually long term staff and develop close relationships with the residents and their families, becoming advocates themselves for the resident.
They are first to know when something changes, especially being the person that cares for them day in and day out, they can quickly alert the Provider and family to make any necessary changes or schedule a doctor’s appointment. The sooner an issue is detected, often the better it can be treated.
The Provider
Something that truly makes Adult Family Homes unique is the Provider. Each Adult Family Home is licensed to a Provider that oversees and manages the care of the residents. While an Adult Family Home is a business, there is something quite special about these Providers.
As a person that has met or spoken with literally hundreds of different Adult Family Home providers, one thing that never ceases to amaze and inspire me is their passion for what they do. To them, it’s quite literally a calling. They absolutely love what they do, they see it as their purpose in life, they take it that seriously.
To the Provider, the resident isn’t just a client, they are part of the family. Many Providers actually live on location. When you place your loved one into an Adult Family Home, they are quite literally becoming part of a family that truly loves and cares for them and sees them as a part of a family. They aren’t just a client, they are truly treasured.
Not every Provider would fit that description and there are some you’d do best to avoid, but from my experience, the overwhelming majority of them would fit into the category of very good Adult Family Home providers.
You don’t need to be an elder care professional to spot the difference, just ask them how they like being a Provider, when you’ve heard them gushing for 10 minutes straight and ready to go another 20 minutes about their favorite resident stories and how well thrilled they are with Matha’s improvement. The joy in their voice will tell you the story.
The Caregivers
One of the questions we ask on our Adult Family Home Listing Form is if they have long-term staff and the overwhelming majority do. It’s very common that the caregivers you will see there have worked there for years. It’s not just that they have lots of experience, it’s a consistency that is vital to the health and well being of the residents and smooth operation of the home.
Usually, Adult Family Homes will have a 1:3 ratio of caregiver to resident, which is incredibly good. A Skilled Nursing Facility will be between 1:10-1:15. They just can’t compete with the one on one level of care that an Adult Family Home can provide and certainly not the consistency of having the same caregiver for the same resident day in and day out.
When you place your loved one in an Adult Family Home, if you’re an active participant in the care of your loved one, you will be on a first name basis, not only with the Provider but with the individual caregivers that care for your loved one.
When trusting someone with the care of someone you love, there’s just nothing that can replace that level of familiarity and communication.
Forever Home
Most every Adult Family Home will have a Medicaid Spend Down policy, in other words, how long they require a resident to be Private Pay before they transition over to Medicaid.
Some Adult Family Homes will accept new residents already on Medicaid, others are quite negotiable only requiring months and many will be somewhere between 1-3 years.
What is special about an Adult Family Home is that once the Private Funds run out, the resident transitions over the Medicaid and for them, everything stays the same.
They don’t have to worry about being evicted for not being able to pay or losing their room or getting a lower quality of care. Once they are in, they will be taken care of for life and it’s one less thing you need to worry about.
With an Adult Family Home, you don’t have to be rich to receive world class care and to me that is one of the things that truly makes them special. Everyone deserves dignity and care and thankfully in an Adult Family Home, everyone, regardless of their ability to pay can receive it.
Communication
From the moment you contact the Adult Family Home you are going to be getting the Provider’s personal cell phone number. You as a family member have easy direct access to the person managing the care of your loved one. You don’t need to wonder who is in charge or who to talk to when you have some concerns, you know exactly who they are and how to reach them.
The communication benefit also applies to the staff in that you’ll know who the staff are because it’s a residential home with only a handful of staff. There isn’t a constant cycling of new caregivers coming through, if Susan is their regular caregiver on weekdays, then you know it’s Susan caring for your loved one.
No Place Like Home
When you imagine home, hopefully you imagine laughter, talking, sharing life’s stories, having friends and family over, holiday celebrations, watching your favorite tv show, eating good food and just enjoying life in your own personal sanctuary.
The key part parts to an Adult Family Home is the Home. You walk into an Adult Family Home and you’ll hear a caregiver joking with a resident or talking about the latest thing going on with their grandchildren. They talk about their day or whatever else is on their minds. Come holiday season, the home will be decorated, family will come over, food will be eaten, songs sung and a good time for all will be had.
An Adult Family Home is a home because it’s a family. They make friends with the other residents, they joke with each other, they live life as we all do, as a family. They have friends and family come to visit and get to live in a real home as a real family. As humans we are social creatures and it’s hard to quantify just how important having that family atmosphere is to a person’s health and well-being. It’s something that Adult Family Homes thrive at.
Conclusion
When I first got into Adult Family Homes I didn’t really appreciate just how special of a place they could be. Over the last few decades I’ve come to understand how fortunate we are in this area to have the Adult Family Home model.
I’ve lost count of the stories from families and Providers of residents that moved in that were in pretty bad shape and didn’t expect to live much longer making these incredible turn arounds and coming back to life and enjoying themselves again and being happy again and feeling good again.
To some people end of life care may seem a tad depressing, but when you come to understand that it’s about the quality of life that each person deserves to have right up until the very end and just how good these Adult Family Homes can be at providing that, you begin to see it as something joyful.
This isn’t a case of the elderly being stashed away into some cold facility, it’s a loving home and does everything they can to bring health, joy and meaning to their life. This is something that every person deserves and what makes us human.
The dignity and love that these residents get to experience on a daily basis and have their final years be ones filled with laugher and love and life is to me one of the most precious things I could imagine.
As Matthew Rycroft once said, “how a society treats its most vulnerable is always the measure of it’s humanity”. To me the Adult Family Home epitomizes this and as a society it is one of the great measures of our humanity.