When it comes to thinking about care, there are many options open to you. While most people are familiar with care homes, many might not have come across 24-hour live-in care as a real alternative.
Here at Agincare, we offer high-quality, good-value care through both live-in care and care and nursing homes. The choice between them comes down to your care needs, your situation and your likes and dislikes.
Let’s compare 24-hour care at home with care homes, and highlight the main benefits of live-in care …
A particularly safe type of care during COVID
The COVID pandemic has underlined the fact that live-in care is a particularly safe form of care. A live-in care worker comes and lives in your home. Because you and your care worker are in the same house, you have someone on hand to support you if you should need to shield, isolate, or simply stay safe at home.
Your care worker can sort tasks like shopping and collecting medication, meaning you don’t have to leave the house. And having them at home with you 24 hours a day gives you someone to talk to and laugh with, reducing the risk of you feeling isolated or lonely.
For your friends and family, live-in care brings real peace of mind, knowing that you’ve got an experienced care worker living with you.
In February 2021 we asked clients, families and friends what they thought about our response to the COVID pandemic. Of those who responded, 93% said they were extremely or very satisfied.
And in our 2020 live-in care client satisfaction survey, 97% of the clients who responded agreed or strongly agreed that, ”The service I receive from Agincare has helped to improve my quality of life”.
Stay in your own home
Just because you may need more support than you used to, it doesn’t mean you need to leave your home. In fact, one of the most obvious benefits of live-in care is that you stay living in your own home. You don’t move out – you carry on sleeping in your own bed, under your own roof.
And if you have a beloved pet which needs walking or feeding, your live-in care worker can take care of them, too!
We‘ve created a series of 3D floorplans to show how simple changes and improvements to a house can help you stay at home safely and comfortably for longer, whether you’re living with dementia, a visual impairment, frailty, Alzheimer’s or a hearing impairment.
Keep your home comforts
With live-in care you keep all your precious belongings with you – nothing changes or has to be given up. Your favourite chair stays in your perfect spot in front of the TV.
The same goes for your meals – your care worker can prepare whatever you like best (within reason!). It means you get to enjoy the home-cooked meals that really tickle your tastebuds, and keep you nourished.
Moving into a care home means you leave your home and go to live in a care or nursing home. And while you can’t take everything with you, in our care homes, we do encourage residents to personalise their own private room with furniture, pictures and photos brought from home.
Keep your social life
Maintaining contact with your circle of friends, attending classes or church, having people round for a cuppa – you do what you want, when you want (COVID guidelines permitting). Your care worker supports you to keep your routine as much as you can.
At a care home there will also be a range of fun and engaging social activities on offer – it’s just that those activities will be designed around the residents as a whole.
Being able to keep your individual routine is especially beneficial for people living with dementia. With live-in care we can offer personalised dementia care at home. This gives someone the support they need, but without bringing too much change, such as leaving their familiar surroundings to move to a care home.
Avoid selling your home
The cost of your live-in care would be based on your needs, not where you live. On the other hand, the monthly cost of a room in a care home will vary greatly, depending on where the home is. If you are still living at home (which elder live-in care would enable you to do), your home cannot be taken into account as an asset when calculating the cost of care.
This means that your home is still yours to bequeath or do with as you wish. This is particularly relevant for people whose combined assets are worth more than £23,250 (the point at which clients become responsible for the full cost of their care).