Assisting Hands Home Care Review

Our Verdict

More and more seniors are hoping to age in place—that is, to stay in their own homes and communities rather than go into assisted living. Many governments and insurance companies are also trying to facilitate this trend by directing resources into helping people stay at home, since, depending on the types of care needed, it tends to cost less and help communities stay intact. As it happens, however, injury and illness can sometimes make it difficult for seniors to stay at home. Fortunately, home care companies exist to bridge the gap between the desire to age in place and the need for help and medical care. Assisting Hands Home Care is a relative newcomer to this industry, but has offices around the country focusing on providing home care and companion services to seniors, and many offices offering higher-level skilled nursing care.

Services Offered

Assisting Hands Home Care Review

Assisting Hands got high marks from its clients and employees, and came in at about the median in terms of costs of care, making it an attractive, economical option for home care in the areas it serves. With employees trained to focus on Alzheimer’s and end-of-life care, and with its commitment to helping people navigate the system to find the benefits and services they need, Assisting Hands is worth contacting if they have an office in your town.

Company Background

Assisting Hands Home Care was founded in 2006 in Nampa, ID, and moved quickly into franchising; the company now has more than 100 locations across the country, each run by independent owner/operators, a standard approach in the home care industry.

While offices are independently owned, the ideal franchise provides enough in the way of standards, training, and other support to ensure consistency of quality across locations. For that reason, we’ve taken a look at how frontline employees in several Assisting Hands locations regarded their work and the people they worked for to get an inside look at how the company operates.

In this regard, Assisting Hands falls in about the middle range of national home care companies: among employees providing reviews on the Glassdoor and Indeed employment websites Assisting Hands’ ratings were in line with its competitors, with most employees at Glassdoor saying that they’d be willing to recommend the company to others. In their reviews, employees consistently expressed appreciation for the clients they worked with, and while there were some complaints about the company’s administration, these were very much in line with employee feedback for other companies.

Services and Offerings

Non-Medical Care

Assisting Hands promotes itself as a provider of quality home care services, in particular the personal and companion care offerings that make up the bulk of seniors’ needs. These services include help with bathing and hygiene, meal preparation, grocery shopping, and a full range of companionship services.

Medical Home Care

Some Assisting Hands locations also provide higher-level and skilled nursing care, including medication administration, help with recovery from surgery or an accident, and physical therapy. Again, however, not all locations offer these services, so it’s important to inquire first if you’re after these services.

Help Navigating Benefits

rue to its name, Assisting Hands also offers its clients help finding services that are available as benefits to them or as offerings in their community, including helping clients navigate local Agencies on Aging and Senior Centers, and getting the benefits they should be able to access via Medicaid, Medicare, and the Veteran’s Administration.

General Guidance

In addition to help with seeking out benefits, Assisting Hands can help clients find help with important practical considerations such as estate planning, advanced directives, and reverse mortgages.

Personal Emergency Response System

As a few other companies do, Assisting Hands offers its clients the use of a medical alert system, which can be useful if they’re going to be alone in between visits from a caregiver. This system can, at the press of a button, put the client in touch with an 24-hour emergency response center, a service which can improve a senior’s confidence and peace of mind about living alone.

Word on the Street

As mentioned above, Assisting Hands is set up as a franchise, with local offices independently owned and operated. So while consumer reviews can be helpful, reviews of one location may or may not reflect all the locations a company operates. Nevertheless, it can be useful to look at the feedback clients have offered in many different places to see if any trends emerge.

We looked at nearly 100 online consumer reviews, covering several different Assisting Hands locations around the country, in order to get a big-picture view of how the company operates, and how satisfied clients and their families were about the service they received. We found that Assisting Hands offices have a solid track record of satisfied clients, certainly in line with most of their competitors in the field. While we did see some of the common complaints that customers have about home care, including scheduling issues and other administrative problems, overall, clients were happy with—and even grateful to—their caregivers, earning the company a weighted average rating of 4.6 out of 5. In addition, we saw the following trends:

• Caregivers got high praise: Most people who go into the helping professions do so because they love their work, and so it’s not a surprise when clients offer their personal caregivers glowing reviews. It is reassuring, however, that Assisting Hands’ caregivers got as much praise from their clients as any company on the market.
• Administrators got high marks: There were a few criticisms of the office staff at individual locations—scheduling was a problem, as it often can be in a busy home care office—but on balance, clients and families were satisfied with the efficiency and professionalism of office staff.
• Trust and dependability: Being able to depend on the staff of a home care company—to provide consistent care, and to show up promptly and regularly—is the bottom line for most clients and their families. Assisting Hands came in very much in line with its competition in this respect, with most clients expressing satisfaction with the reliability of their local office.

Cost and Value

As you look into rates, it’s important to keep in mind that what a company charges for home care can depend on a number of factors, including the local cost of labor, local regulations, the amount of care needed, and especially the intensity of care that the client requires. Still, to get a sense of trends in the rates companies charge, we survey a number of local offices around the country and then compare rates to the median rates for the area as provided by the Genworth Cost of Care study.

Based on our survey, Assisting Hands Home Care came in at close to the median in terms of costs in the areas we surveyed, though some locations do charge tend to charge more than the median rate for more basic levels of care.