If you are wondering what is a home health aide, read on and learn. Home health aides go by many various names including home health aide, homemaker, personal attendant or even home medical attendant. Home health aides are employed by families whom have elderly or disabled family members who need assistance with care giving, and in general, help keeping the family member at home.
What Is A Home Health Aide – job duties

Home Health Aide

Home health aides follow treatment plans written by nurses or or doctors and work under the supervision of family members, a registered nurse or physical therapist. Home health aides take care of household chores for elderly or disabled patients. They may also, by extension take care of the patients children or parents in different cases. In general, home health aides are around to do, generally, whatever it is the patients need done. The home health aides job is to keep a household running as normal as possible while the sick is at home, thereby abrogating the need to move to a nursing home or elder care facility.

What Is A Home Health Aide?

Home health aides often times have varying duties. These duties are often times referred to as Activities of Daily Living or ADL’s in industry. An aide will often times go to the same home every day for month and eve years. Aides may also provide services to multiple families through the course o fa day. Typical duties could include helping patients bathe, assisting with toilets and bed pans, assisting the patient in their movement, and other domestic duties of this nature. Home health aides are qualified to perform other diagnostic duties such as checking pulses and breathing rates. HHA’s are able to change bandages and they will help patients take medicine. Another duty of home health aides is to perform cleaning for the comfort and sanitary needs of the patient. This cleaning can extend to light housework including the cleaning of a patients room, kitchen or bathroom. This cleaning is often limited to simple tasks such as straightening out a room, kitchen and bathroom. Similarly, a HHA may help with laundry, especially changing sheets, linens and pillow cases.
What Is A Home Health Aide – the daily tasks

Home Health Aide

Something people don’t think about when asking themselves, What Is A Home Health Aide, has to do with the run of the mill duties of an HHA. Some aides help plan meals and special diets that are in dietary accordance with the patients needs. This may mean that the HHA needs to shop for food and even prepare the meals. In addition to these duties. home health aides provide emotional support for their patients. Part of this emphasis on healthy holistic living may lead the HHA to teach their patient how to take care of themselves by doing their own healthy cooking.

Since home health aides work in their patients’ homes, it is important for HHA’s to be strong and physically fit. This means that the HHA is able to bend, lift and do other thing associated with cooking, cleaning and moving the patient around.

While some home health aides find the job and career path to be extremely rewarding, there is a high level of turnover due to the low skill requirements, low pay and high emotional and physical demands of the job. You should now know everything you need to know in order to determine What Is A Home Health Aide. So, can you answer the question: What Is A Home Health Aide?