Guides for Families Navigating Home Care

How to Choose a Home Care Agency: Questions to Ask and Red Flags to Watch For

To choose a home care agency, confirm what licensing applies in your state, who employs and supervises the caregivers, what screening and training they complete, and what happens when a caregiver calls out. Here are the questions to ask and the warning signs to watch for.

Signs Your Parent Needs Help at Home: A Practical Checklist for Families

Falls, weight loss, missed medications, unpaid bills, declining hygiene, and social withdrawal can all signal that living independently has become harder. Here's how to tell a one-off from a pattern, and what to do about it.

Caring for Someone With Parkinson's Disease at Home

Parkinson's home care revolves around medication timing, safe movement, fall and freezing prevention, exercise, and non-movement symptoms such as constipation, sleep problems, depression, low blood pressure and swallowing changes. Here's how to build a plan around all of it.

Dementia Care at Home: A Practical Guide for Families

Dementia care at home usually becomes more hands-on as memory, judgment, communication, mobility, and self-care abilities decline. Here's how to maintain routines, reduce safety risks, respond to behavioral changes, and know when the care plan needs to change.

Fall Prevention at Home: A Room-by-Room Safety Guide

More than 14 million older Americans fall each year. Clearing hazards and improving lighting matters, but so do balance, strength, medications, vision, and footwear. Here's a room-by-room guide plus the personal risk factors families often miss.

Post-Stroke Care at Home: Supporting Recovery Day to Day

Post-stroke care at home combines rehabilitation, help with daily activities, fall prevention, medication management, communication and swallowing support, and preventing another stroke. Here's what changes day to day and how to build a plan around it.

Post-Surgery Recovery Care at Home: What Families Need to Arrange

Safe recovery at home after surgery starts before discharge, not on the day the hospital sends someone home. Families need to know the mobility and weight-bearing restrictions, wound-care instructions, medication schedule, pain plan, follow-up appointments, equipment needs and exactly who will provide help with bathing, meals, toileting and transfers.

Home Care Glossary: Common Terms Families Need to Know

Plain-language definitions for the terms that come up most when researching home care, Medicaid waivers, and senior care benefits — ADLs, IADLs, HCBS, LTSS, self-direction, level of care, and the financial rules families most often misunderstand.