All News Articles
“Need for Health Aides Soon Will be Mushrooming”
Nov 08, 2011
A good article hitting on several very important points in the government and privately funded sectors of non-medical home care. Caregivers play a vital role in providing seniors and the physically and mentally challenged some much wanted and needed independence and more importantly, caregivers allow them to live at home or the facility of their choice. They can also give family caregivers much needed respite from the daily chore of caregiving.
I agree with the article that one of the major challenges in the occupation of caregiving is the low pay. There are opposing factors in play in reference to caregiver pay. On one hand you have low government reimbursements for Medicare or community based funded agencies and on the other hand you have to make the care affordable to the clients. Griswold Special Care began in 1982 using as a consumer directed business model that was briefly touched on in the article. Rather than the client taking on the burden of hiring and becoming an employer, our consumer directed business model allows us to pay our caregivers a much higher rate (starting at $10.50 an hour, which is 40% higher than the average for personal care attendants in Texas) while at the same time keeping our overhead low. The low overhead allows us to be the lowest provider of PAS services in San Antonio making us a good value at $15.00/hour. The high wages allows us to be more selective in our hiring process. Our rate breakdown makes us unique in the private pay sector of home care. Most agency directed models pay their caregivers about half of the hourly rate they charge their clients. Some of this is due to their overhead and some of course for an increase in profit. We currently pay our caregivers 70% of our hourly rate.
While we still put the caregivers through a rigorous screening process, test, train and monitor our caregiver pool on behalf of our clients, the clients are the ones that say when , where and which caregiver they want, which is a major difference between the agency directed and consumer directed home care models. Many agency directed agencies have long disparaged our consumer directed model because they can neither understand nor compete against our model…George McGuire, http://www.griswoldsa.com
Veteran’s Benefits - Are You Missing Out?
Oct 18, 2011
The total veteran population in the United States has reached nearly 23 million, with almost 40 percent of those over the age of 65 (http://www.va.gov, 2011). When compared to every other country...
Advanced Directives
Oct 07, 2011
With continued advances in modern medicine and technology a patient can be kept alive indefinitely with no chance of recovery. Its important to document your health care wishes whether you are a...
