HomeWell Senior Care Review

Our Verdict

HomeWell focuses on lower level care, but the company has a stellar record of client satisfaction, and also focuses on providing care tailored to the individual client’s needs. And with its caregivers trained specifically in ways of engaging clients and getting them active in stimulating activities, it’s an excellent choice in home care.

Services Offered

HomeWell Senior Care Review

More and more seniors are choosing to age in place—that is, to stay in their homes and communities for as long as possible, and to adapt their homes to the challenges that aging presents. For these seniors, home care can help them maintain their independence longer by helping them with the day-to-day activities that may become more difficult as time goes on, activities like housekeeping or even taking care of their own feeding and toileting needs. HomeWell Senior Care offers a full spectrum of such services, and makes an effort to tailor them to the needs of each client on a case-by-case basis.

Company Background

HomeWell was founded in 2002, and began to expand via franchising in 2003. Based in Fort Worth, Texas, it’s one of the smaller home care franchises in the US, with around 60 locations. While most locations are independently owned, franchises tend to influence the standards and practices of their franchisees, and in order to get a sense of HomeWell’s offices from the inside, we had a look at employee reviews from around the country as posted on employee rating sites such as Indeed and Glassdoor. We found that HomeWell had the highest employee ratings of all the home care companies we’ve reviewed, and more than nine out of ten employees reviewing the company on Glassdoor said that they’d recommend HomeWell to their peers looking for work, which speaks volumes about the corporate culture—and suggests that clients can expect more longevity and less turnover than usual among their caregivers.

Services and Offerings 

Companionship

Like almost all home care companies, HomeWell offers a full range of companion care services, including medication reminders, transportation help, help with laundry and light housekeeping, and meal planning and preparation.

Personal Care

In line with many of its competitors, HomeWell also provides some higher level personal care services to people who need help with day-to-day activities like feeding and grooming or hygiene. The company doesn’t go beyond this, but it does cover all the basic types of care that most of its competitors offer.

Hourly Care

Most companies base their care plans on single visits during the day, but HomeWell offers hourly care options, including custom plans that can be implemented around the clock and adjusted based on the client’s individual needs.

Couples Care

In a similar vein, HomeWell also offers care tailored specifically for couples with an understanding that seniors living together may have different needs and concerns than seniors living alone.

The LEAP Program

As part of their companion care offerings, HomeWell promotes its LEAP program, which assess the client’s capabilities so the caregiver can offer a selection of hobbies and activities that will boost the client’s involvement and stimulate mental functioning.

Word on the Street

Almost all home care companies operate as franchises, and since each office operates independently, online reviews from around the country may not give you an accurate impression of your local branch. It’s always essential to get as much word of mouth about a potential agency as you can, and to ask for references and talk to current clients before you choose the provider you want to work with. That said, taking a broad look at online reviews can reveal trends among a franchise’s offices. That’s what we’ve done with consumer reviews of HomeWell: we gathered over 100 reviews of offices around the country and came up with a weighted rating for customer service of 5 out of 5 stars, one of the highest we’ve seen in our look at home care agencies. And we found the following trends in our survey of customer comments:

Service Batting A Thousand

Usually our survey will come across at least one or two complaints about caregivers, but not in the case of HomeWell. The vast majority of clients of all companies like their caregivers, but to come across no complaints in a random sample—and to get the number of reviews specifically praising caregivers’ compassion and competence that we found among the reviews we surveyed—is a significant achievement and bodes well for the quality of care HomeWell offers.

Same Goes For Office Staff

HomeWell customers also had good experiences with office and administrative staff, and both caregivers and office staff also won praise for their professionalism, specifically for their willingness to keep lines of communication open between caregivers, administrators, family members, and health care providers.

Trust And Dependability

Reliability is key for home care workers: no one wants to have their help show up late or not at all, and no one wants to feel that the people looking after their loved ones require supervision by family members. Here again, HomeWell stands out: many of the reviews we surveyed specifically mention how clients and their families felt they could rely on their caregivers to provide needed services even without being asked, and there were no complaints about punctuality, missed shifts, or issues with scheduling.

Cost and Value

Costs in home care can vary based on the area where the care is being provided, based on the type of care needed, and sometimes on the amount of care the client is likely to need. And since franchised locations are independently owned and operated, they set their own rates based on these factors. Still, it can be useful to look at costs across locations in order to get a sense of any trends among the offices run by a franchised company. In order to do this with HomeWell, we got in touch with HomeWell locations around the country and compared their rates with the local median rate as provided in the Genworth Financial Cost of Care study.

Based on this survey, we found that HomeWell’s locations tended to charge a little above the local median in their locations, though certainly in line with their local competitors. Policies around the rates charged also tend to vary, though most locations will charge more for weekend shifts, and may charge less if they’re called on to provide a large number of hours of care during the week. Locations also tended not to require a minimum visit length, but would sometimes require clients to receive a minimum number of hours of care each week, in keeping with HomeWell’s more flexible approach to senior care.