With No One Else, Healthy at Home Stepped In
Despite the fact that it’s been operating since 1997, many in our community are still unfamiliar with Harbor Care’s Healthy at Home programming and its homecare services.
A Medicare-certified home health organization, every morning Harbor Care’s Healthy at Home staff fan out across Greater Nashua, providing medical care such as dispensing medications, caring for wounds, checking blood pressures and monitoring oxygen saturation levels (as well as helping with domestic tasks such as cooking, cleaning, and bathing). Comprised of nurses, nurse practitioners, licensed nursing assistants, and personal care services providers, Healthy at Home staff serve anyone who needs homecare services in Greater Nashua and Southern New Hampshire, including Nashua, Amherst, Brookline, Hollis, Hudson, Litchfield, Merrimack, Milford, and Bedford. If someone from outside of this service area requires at-home care, Healthy at Home staff will help them find homecare services in their own town
The clients come from various walks of life; many held a variety of professions in their earlier years. They often come to depend on the services that Healthy at Home provides due to accidents or major surgeries – after which they need care in their homes during their recovery period. Others are elderly, or have chronic disabilities such as severe mental illness or developmental disorder, which makes homecare their best option o maintain independence and avoid nursing home care.
Harbor Care’s CEO Peter Kelleher recently sat down with us to talk about the early years of this vital program.
Q: How did Healthy at Home begin?
The Staff of Healthy at Home in 2002; Peter Kelleher can be seen center right. Nineteen years later, many of the faces have changed, but Healthy at Home is still serving clients in Greater Nashua seven days a week.
A: We got into provision of home health services because our clients at the time – who were mainly people with severe and pervasive mental illness – couldn't easily access home care. They had limited ability to care for themselves in a number of areas, but when we made referrals for them to existing home health agencies, it was a real challenge in getting them services.
Q: What made it so challenging?
A: At that time, there was a lot of fear and stigma about mental illness. Traditional home health workers were fearful about going into our client's homes and delivering those services. Home health services are very personal; it often requires you to be alone with the person, and this made some uncomfortable. Despite our best efforts, our clients would often be refused service, or they would be put on a long waiting list where they would languish...which is pretty much the same thing as a refusal of service. This is how we noticed that there was a gap in our local community’s provision of care. No one was serving some of the most vulnerable folks in our community – and no one was going to serve them anytime soon – so we stepped in.
Q: How did you respond to this gap?
A: We realized that, in order for our clients to get in-home health services, we would have to start our own home care program. We hired a consultant to work with us over couple of years to help us work through the various regulations and requirements to be a home health provider. Going down that path, we learned that it couldn’t simply be a program of Harbor Care – it needed to be a separate nonprofit with its own 503(c)(3) status whose primary activity was the delivery of that home health services. It took three years, but we finally got Healthy at Home established as Medicare Certified Home Health Agency, a 501(c)(3) corporation within the larger Harbor Care family.
Q: How did you come up with the name?
A: The name Healthy at Home...it just popped into my head. It fit, because that's the objective, right? We wanted our clients to be “healthy at home”, and the name makes that clear.
Q: What are you most proud of about Healthy at Home?
A: Healthy at Home programming is an incredible value-add to Harbor Care in the array of services that it provides. There been numerous situations where clients from other programs have developed medical complexities that made it impossible for them to care for themselves for a period of time – or permanently. The presence of the Healthy at Home staff going out and meeting these clients where they live made all the difference in their outcomes. To give an example, one of our veteran clients might suffer a debilitating stroke, or a client with severe mental illness might attempt suicide. Either of these things would render them unable to care for themselves. Healthy at Home is the difference between folks being able to remain in their own homes, or being institutionalized.
Q: Is there an advantage for clients in that Healthy at Home is part of Harbor Care?
Absolutely. In the same way that doctors refer their patients to Healthy at Home for home services, Healthy at Home staff can refer their clients to services throughout the greater organization. Maybe a Healthy at Home client develops a need for substance use disorder treatment, or dental services, for example. Perhaps they slide into depression; that’s quite common, actually – finding depression among older and disabled persons is prevalent. In these cases, Healthy at Home is able to lean on Harbor Care services to gain rapid access to whatever kind of care their clients need, really any sort of thing that may come up. Healthy at Home staff will refer them to the appropriate care within the larger Harbor Care family, and arrange for the safe transportation of the clients between home and their appointments.
Q: What do you want the public to know?
I just want to remind people that, on any given day – seven days a week – Healthy at Home staff are out in our communities, cleaning clients’ homes, changing their bandages, dispensing medications, cooking meals, and an almost infinite range of other things. You’ll probably never notice them, but they’re there, in every neighborhood.
Because of this type of personalized care, we have clients who remain with us and thrive for decades. This is just vital. There is no one else who would pick up those services if we weren't providing them…no one else who would pick up the services if we weren't there.
For more information on Healthy at Home, visit its web page or call 603-595-4243 to speak with a staff person.