A Home Health Aide also referred to as a Home Caregiver, Patient Care Technician, a Residential Assistant or Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA), provides health-related services and personal care to various patients requiring more assistance than what their family can provide.
A Home Health Aide (HHA) is given assignments by a physical therapist, a registered nurse or other health professionals or home health agency. An HHA is tasked to record services that she performed including the patient’s condition and progress.
The following are the types of patients that a Home Health Aide may work with:
• The physically disabled
• The terminally ill
• The elderly
• Hospice patients
• Adults with mental disabilities
• Convalescent persons
• Children with mental illness
• Individuals with long-term illness
Being Home Health Aides, they work generally in the patient’s residence performing and assisting with various duties including:
• Changing (surgical) dressings
• Checking the patient’s temperature, pulse, respiration rates
• Helping to move patients in and out of bed, wheelchairs, baths, chairs, cars
• Assisting with patient’s prescribed exercises
• Providing emotional and psychological support
• Administering prescribed medications
• Purchasing and preparing meals as prescribed
• Maintain patient’s mental health by reading aloud to, or conversing with the patients
• Grooming, dressing, personal hygiene
• Changing bed linens
Aside from these tasks, Home Health Aides are also occasionally required to do household chores like doing the laundry, cleaning and grocery shopping.
A Home Health Aide’s Job Characteristics
Most HHAs work full time at 40 hours a week and a few works part-time. A lot also do night shifts, weekends and holidays for their patients needing 24 hour care. HHAs are typically employed by the county or state welfare agencies, private home health facilities or self-employed.
An HHA’s job can be physically demanding with long hours of standing and walking and moving their patients around. Minor infections and major diseases are HHA’s occupational hazards. Many duties of HHAs include tasks that individuals may find unpleasant like changing soiled beddings, emptying bedpans, etc.
Though the job is emotionally and physically demanding, Home Health Aides do find it gratifying to enhance their patients’ lives and be valuable companions to those in need.
Home Health Aides in general possess these attributes and abilities: dependability, patience, emotional stability, precision and accuracy, discretion, honesty, sensitivity, being service oriented, good physical health, strong communications skills, socially perceptive, ability to work as part of a team and problem solving abilities.
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