The Benefits of Working for a Reputable Home Care Agency
As a home caregiver, you understand that caregiving is more than just a job — it’s a vocation. Caring for people in their homes requires qualities like empathy, compassion, patience, fortitude, and excellent communication skills, and the home care agency you work for should reflect those same qualities in how they treat their caregivers.
A reputable home care agency understands that its business model is only as strong as the caregivers themselves. By incorporating high standards, a home care agency gains many benefits, including a low turnover/high retention rate for caregivers and producing a quality service that results in satisfied clients and a well known reputation.
Caregivers, too, gain benefits from working for a reputable home care agency. If you’re a home caregiver at Alegre Home Care, here are some of the top benefits you can expect:
A Flexible Schedule and Stable Hours
Many home caregivers find themselves in the unfortunate situation of having to moonlight with several home care agencies just to get enough hours to survive. These agencies tend to only offer part-time hours and strict schedules. So a caregiver ends up in a situation of doing a few hours here and a few hours there with several different home care agencies, none of which make the caregiver feel like a valuable employee.
A reputable home care agency will provide at least some flexibility for their home caregivers. An agency like Alegre Home Care tries to find the best fit possible when pairing caregivers with clients, which takes things like schedules into consideration, as well as similar interests and skills required for each caregiving client. A reputable home care agency understands the value of long-term retention, and will ensure a stable work environment so that their home caregivers feel like they are an important part of the company.
Healthy Lifestyle
Many home care agencies don’t put effort into helping their caregivers maintain a healthy lifestyle. In fact, many of those agencies even repel the employer mandate of the Affordable Care Act requiring employer paid health benefits. Having complicated schedules, a lack of support, and no health benefits can all lead to caregiver burnout, which is bad for the caregivers and their clients.
A reputable home care agency understands the dangers of caregiver burnout.
At Alegre Home Care, we fully embrace the Affordable Care Act and ask employees to give us their flexibility so we may maximize their schedule to achieve the minimum weekly hour requirement of 30 hours to qualify for benefits. Additionally, a reputable home care agency will offer support to their caregivers and will work with them to encourage healthy living so that both caregivers and clients feel taken care of.
Invaluable Training
Sadly, many home care agencies lag behind in training standards and use outdated practices for caregiving. Or they require caregivers to find third-party training programs when they need additional skills. Home caregiving can be tough work, and having to find outside training makes the work all the more challenging. A lack of training leads to unsafe caregiving practices and puts both caregivers and clients at risk.
It’s important to work for a reputable home care agency that recognizes the importance of training and sets high standards for their caregiving services. For example, at Alegre Home Care, we offer on-the-job, formal classroom, and online training, either free of cost or actual paid training.
Career Opportunities
While some agencies look at caregiving as just a job, reputable agencies know that home caregiving is so much more than that. At Alegre Home Care, we look for compassionate mission-driven caregivers that share our same company values of diversity and inclusion. We want to work with caregivers who desire the support of a stable and professional supervisory and management team to help fulfil long-long family promises to help families stay together.
Since we recognize that caregiving is more than a job, this means we recognize that caregiving is a career. As such, reputable home care agencies will offer ongoing employment to their caregivers and will provide a career ladder to those who wish to further their education and move upward in the health care and nursing fields.
Do You Want to Work for a Reputable Home Care Agency?
Alegre Home Care is always looking for quality caregivers who value working for a reputable home care agency in San Francisco and the Bay Area. We are an attractive choice for caregivers of many backgrounds, such as nurses who are re-entering the workforce, perhaps after raising their own families. We are also a great choice for young people with informal training as a caregiver or childcare sitter to enter the professional employment field. And of course, we are a perfect fit for qualified caregivers who seek to work for an agency that reflects their values.
