To the editor:
Home health agencies provide interdisciplinary health care to individuals at home. You may be familiar with some forms of this care. Thousands of exceptional people with specialized training make it happen, working together to overcome countless medical, social and environmental hurdles in too-often untold ways.
A pediatric speech pathologist on Long Island is making it possible for children to wean off feeding tubes they’ve had since birth. With care at home, not in a pediatric care facility, she is teaching kids to do what many take for granted: eat and grow.
A physical therapist with highly specialized training in rural Upstate New York – one of nearly 3,000 therapists in home care across the state – works with patients at home to control painful swelling from lymphedema, a side effect of breast cancer surgery. She does so in a region where this kind of therapy is not otherwise within reach. And she is helping patients avoid readmission to the hospital.
Among nearly 11,000 home care RNs in New York are those serving persons with developmental disabilities in the Buffalo area. They are using remote-monitoring technologies and innovative triage protocols that have reduced hospitalizations by 25 percent for nearly 1,000 patients at one home care agency alone. And nurses at another organization in the North Country have reduced hospital readmissions by 60 percent using similar technologies to bridge access to care in sparsely populated communities.
Meanwhile, RNs in almost every county of New York state have been trained to use new sepsis screening protocols. These protocols are preventing a top cause of potentially avoidable hospitalizations – sepsis – which claims a life every two minutes. These nurses are delivering a level and frequency of direct clinical screening that exists nowhere else in health care for a condition that occurs in the community 80 percent of the time, even though many people wrongly associate sepsis with primarily hospital occurrence.
Home care RNs are healing wounds and preventing infections, recording vitals necessary for cardiac care, assessing for safety risks in an environment that otherwise lacks the controls of a hospital or nursing home, and managing medications for thousands of individuals. This includes the nearly 63 percent of home care patients who suffer from five or more chronic conditions in New York State.
Bridging all of these efforts – and more – are nearly 200,000 home health aides statewide. They are assisting in therapies, assisting patients with medication compliance, and preparing meals that adhere to the strict dietary requirements of individuals with complex health care diagnoses in order to overcome medical frailty. They help with activities-of-daily living. Their training in safe transferring techniques are preventing falls. They learn positioning skills to prevent wounds from occurring or worsening. They meet the needs of the whole person.
Home health and personal care aides are the eyes and ears for over a half-million home care patients in New York State who could not receive care at home but for the direct, often daily contact of an aide supporting every effort of the home care clinical team as well as the entire health system that home care connects to.
For all of these exceptional individuals, and the programs that support their work, I give enormous thanks this National Home Care Month.
To read more of their stories and learn about this exceptional service, please visit nationalhomecaremonth.com.
Al Cardillo
President and CEO
The Home Care Association of New York State
