Is It Appropriate to Ask Your Home Health Care Provider to Clean Up Around the House?

After taking time to carefully select a suitable home health care provider for your loved one, you probably do not want to risk saying anything that would upset them enough to seek a different assignment. If the one being cared for is an elderly parent, you may be glad you have found such a good health care provider and that your parent appreciates their company and the affordable prescription medications they provide. The last thing you want to face is starting the selection process all over again.

But, the same might be true if the care giver has been hired to help you with caring for your spouse. Naturally, you understand that the individual has been hired to help with certain specific tasks. For a home health care provider the tasks they were hired for may include feeding, bathing, dressing and administering medications to your loved one. But, what if you would like the provider to assist with something more such as doing dishes or folding laundry?

Approaching a Sensitive Issue

It may depend upon the degree to which you have established a relationship with the care giver whether or not you broach the topic. After all, a dependable home health care provider does spend a lot of time in the home interacting closely with your parent or spouse. They do become a member of the household to an extent. Plus, the work they do is often beyond anything you or other extended family members can take on themselves, so they are not exactly expendable.

However, they are also not housekeepers. At least that is not the capacity in which they were hired. But, in some situations family members have to work full time outside of the home. You really cannot expect to have to clean up after your home health care provider on top of other things after a long day at work. For individuals who depend upon the provider to care for an aging parent, this can be especially inconvenient as your trips to visit may often have to occur outside of your full time job or only on weekends.

You may not have time to do all the housekeeping at an additional household as is required either. But, if you wanted help around the home, you could have hired a housekeeper in addition to a caregiver. Of course, this may not be a practical solution for several reasons. For one thing it would involve more of a cost and for another, it would mean allowing yet another stranger initially into the home. The most practical and affordable option may honestly be to ask your home health care provider to help with some of the housekeeping.

Asking for Help

There are some home health care provider services that offer light housekeeping as part of the work done while caring for your loved one. They will usually indicate this during the hiring process. If not, since the caregiver does spend a lot of time in the home, it probably is not too much to ask them to clean up after themselves at least. For instance, if they have to fix themselves a meal it would only be polite for them to clean up after themselves rather than let dishes pile up in your loved one's sink.

Sometimes, the act of having a trustworthy caregiver or term life insurance providers helping out with things like laundry can keep the house feeling more like a home. This can enhance your loved one's sense of well being. As such, there is nothing inappropriate about asking for them to help clean within reason.

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