Amada Senior Care Review

Our Verdict

Aging in place—in which older people stay in their homes as long as possible—is a growing trend in the United States, with more and more seniors arranging their lives to avoid moving into assisted living or other senior housing. Even for people who haven’t set out to avoid leaving their homes, injuries or surgery will often force a choice between a spell in a rehabilitation facility or relying on friends and family to sustain them until they regain their independence. There’s another way, however: for those hoping to stay in their homes long-term, or for those looking to overcome a temporary setback, home care agencies can provide the assistance a senior needs without forcing them out of the house or forcing them to impose on their loved ones. Amada Senior Care offers this kind of care to its clients, as well as some other useful services, which we’ll be taking a look at below.

Services Offered

The Bottom Line

Amada focuses on lower-level home care services, but, judging by online reviews, it provides these services with excellence. What’s more, for seniors facing the confusing tangle of issues connected to housing, long-term care insurance, or veterans’ benefits, Amada offers quality advice and consultation, and has a track record of making a positive difference on these fronts. Finally, by offering its unique and innovative online monitoring services, Amada goes the extra mile to help loved ones stay in touch and on top of the client’s health issues. For all these reasons, Amada stands out in this field, and is worth contacting if there’s an office in your area.

Company Background

Based in San Clemente, CA, Amada was founded in 2007. Within six years, the company began to expand through franchising, and now has over 100 locations across the US, making it one of the smaller national home care agencies. The Amada central office doesn’t have direct control over its branch offices, but it does provide guidance, offer support and training, and set standards for business practices and care.

In order to get a glimpse into Amada’s organization and approach, and to get a sense of how local offices are run, we turned to employee review sites such as Glassdoor and Indeed, and surveyed the online reviews left by its employees. Looking at reviews from around the country, and focusing on the front-line staff, we found that Amada actually stands out among its competition in terms of employee satisfaction: At Glassdoor, Amada enjoys one of the highest ratings among major home care companies, with almost four out of five current and former employees indicating that they’d be willing to recommend their local Amada office to their peers seeking work—a recommendation rate that puts Amada in the top fifth of companies we’ve surveyed, and that suggests that Amada might enjoy a lower rate of turnover than its competitors.

Services and Offerings

Companionship

Amada offers most of the services that fall under the heading of companion care and home care, including medication reminders, help with bathing, dressing, and other grooming activities, light housekeeping duties, laundry, and meal planning and preparation. Amada caregivers also provide help outside the home, including running errands, providing transportation, and doing needed shopping. Finally, Amada offers some more intensive personal care services, such as feeding and toileting help.

Senior Housing Consultation

In addition to home care, Amada also offers some services that relate to other areas of senior living. One of these areas is senior housing: not all seniors want to age in place, and for those who would prefer to move, or who would like to explore their options, Amada offers assistance negotiating the local senior care market and can help seniors and their families find the right type of senior housing for their particular needs.

Assistance With Long-Term Care Insurance

Amada also offers help shopping for, and accessing benefits from, long-term care insurance. For those worried about paying for home care or assisted living, long-term care insurance can be a huge help—but it can also be confusing, and, as with all insurance, accessing benefits can be a challenge. Amada bills itself as ready to help seniors shop for insurance, and more importantly, navigate the system to secure the benefits that their premiums have entitled them to.

BeClose With Amada

As part of a growing trend, Amada offers to provide clients with monitoring technology—motion sensors, mostly—that can keep track of their activity and alert family and caregivers when there’s a change. In this area, Amada has teamed up with BeClose, allowing clients’ families to use BeClose’s online system to make sure that all is well with their loved one.

Transparent

In a significant innovation, Amada has developed a system that allows families in remote locations to log on and access a record of the care that Amada’s front line employees have provided, allowing them to monitor and correct the care plan as needed.

Word on the Street

As mentioned above, Amada is run on a franchise model, and like most home care companies in the US, local offices are independently owned and operated. So it’s important to remember that national trends among a company’s franchises may not be reflected in the office in your area. Because the quality of local offices varies, it’s essential to look at least a handful of local agencies, ask for references from the ones that you think might suit you, and, if possible, speak to current clients.

That said, the central company still has an influence on local franchises, and solid national trends can indicate that a company is doing things right. We’ve had a look at dozens of consumer reviews of Amada locations (as posted on online forums such as Yelp, Google, and others) to see if any trends stood out.

Our finding? Amada offers care in line with industry standards, and offices all around the country received high marks for their reliability and efficiency, earning the company a weighted average rating of 4.8 out of 5 among the reviews we collected. Here are some specifics:

• Professional, compassionate caregivers: It’s normal for people to have praise for their caregivers, and that’s obviously a good thing. And since Amada’s caregivers received reviews on a par with those with other agencies, that means that reviewers had consistently positive things to say, and offered few complaints or criticisms.
• Additional services also praised: As we’ve noted, Amada offers a range of additional services beyond non-medical home care, and these additional services also received praise in online forums. In particular, customers expressed gratitude for the help they received with getting the long-term care insurance benefits they paid for—and a few also expressed appreciation for Amada’s help in finding senior housing.
• Trust and dependability: Amada’s administrative staff also got high marks, with customers praising the efficiency and professionalism of caregivers and administrators. We also found few complaints about caregivers’ punctuality, or about scheduling problems or issues related to the care received.

Cost and Value

In order to get a sense of how home care companies charge for care relative to their competitors, we survey a cross-section of locations around the country. Since the rates companies charge for home care can vary based on location, local regulations, and the type and intensity of care provided, we compare our findings to state- and city-level data about median rates as provided in the Genworth Cost of Care study.

With this in mind, we found Amada’s hourly rates for home care services to be fairly economical, and largely in line with neighboring companies. It should be noted that Amada does focus on lower-level care, and some of its competitors offer more in the way of skilled nursing, but overall Amada does manage to keep its rates competitive.