This is usually the question underneath the question about price. Families want a number, and nobody can give them one without knowing what the days look like.
Here’s how to work it out for yourself before anyone quotes you anything.
Start with the hard parts of the day, not the whole day
Most people don’t need someone there all day. They need someone there for the two or three stretches that have become difficult.
Write down the last week honestly. When did things go wrong or nearly go wrong? When did you get a phone call? When did you drive over?
Those blocks are your starting hours. Everything else can wait.
Mornings
For a lot of older people this is the hardest hour of the day. Getting out of bed, washing, dressing, breakfast, medication reminders. Stiff joints, poor balance, and the highest risk of a fall.
If mornings are the problem, two to three hours a day covers it, and that alone solves a surprising amount.
Meals
Ask what your parent actually ate yesterday, not what’s in the cupboard.
If cooking has stopped and it’s cereal twice a day, someone coming in to cook and sit down to eat with them changes their nutrition and their week. That’s often a couple of hours around lunchtime or early evening.
Evenings and nights
Evenings are when a lot of families struggle, and nights are what tips people into thinking about a facility.
If your father is fine during the day but unsettled after dark, or getting up several times a night, that’s an evening shift or overnight support rather than more daytime hours. With dementia, late afternoon is often the hardest stretch of all.
The gaps you’re currently filling
This is the part families skip. Count your own hours.
The drive over. The Tuesday you take off work. The call at eleven at night. The shopping you do on the way home. If you’re covering fifteen hours a week yourself, that’s the real number, and paid help doesn’t have to replace all of it to change your life.
Rough shapes that work
Every family is different, but most arrangements look like one of these.
A few hours, two or three days a week. Company, meals, errands, light housekeeping. This is where most people start and plenty never need more.
Daily mornings, or daily mornings and evenings. Usually when personal care has entered the picture.
Most of the day. When someone can’t safely be alone for long, but nights are still manageable.
Overnight or 24 hour home care. When nights are the problem, or after a hospital stay when someone shouldn’t be alone at all.
What the minimum means
Most agencies have a minimum number of hours per visit or per week, and it’s worth asking about early, because it affects what’s actually possible.
The reason minimums exist is caregiver retention. Nobody builds a working week out of one-hour visits scattered across a city, and short fragmented shifts are how agencies end up with caregivers who don’t stay.
Hours change, and they go down as well as up
After a hospital stay, most families start heavy and taper. Heavy cover in week one, a few days a week by week three, then done.
With a longer-term situation it usually moves the other way, gradually. The care plan is meant to move with it, which is why hours aren’t fixed at the start.
The honest way to get a number
Have someone look at the actual situation. The free in-home assessment exists for this, and a decent one should end with a specific recommendation and a specific figure rather than a range.
If you come away from an assessment being quoted more hours than the day you described seems to need, ask why. There should be a clear answer.
How Golden Years helps
Golden Years Home Care has provided non-medical in-home care across California since 1996. We’re family owned, and our caregivers are our own employees, screened and background checked.
We provide companion care, personal care, respite care, dementia care, Alzheimer’s care at home and 24 hour home care. Care starts with a free in-home assessment, and if we think you need fewer hours than you’re asking for, we’ll say so.
Licensed Home Care Organization #344700040.
