Home Care: Considering the Plan of Care (POC) Webinar Series

This video was recorded from the live webinar on March 26, 2026.

Home Care Expert Webinar: Plans of Care

In both inpatient and outpatient/home care settings, patient falls are one of the most common injuries that our health care experts see in their forensic casework. In this 30-min webinar, Dr. Joseph Muniak focuses on home care Plans of Care & Activities of Daily Living (ADLs), discussing the standards of care for home care professionals as it relates to litigation involving these components of in-home care.

Transcript Excerpt

There are a lot of differences between home care and what happens within hospital or medical settings. The standards are different, and what you're expecting of those caregivers are often different. To put it simply, when they're in facilities, we oftentimes have the rules that they need to follow and things that we do where they're depending on the agreement and the care plan, which we'll spend a lot of time on today, can vary in the amount of supervision assistance provided as long as that's agreed upon between two parties.

So just to wet your whistle a little bit, some of the things that we see ...  tend to be around falls. Falls are a pretty obvious and common one that's with or without an assisted device, can be during transfers, that's usually when it occurs. Incidents within the bathroom, so falls involving the tub transfers on and off the toilet, things related to bathroom assistance.

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Some other areas we see are feeding, that has to do with food consistency, the size of that, the food aspiration possibilities, those sort of things, and then occasionally abuse from the caregiver.

So to give a little background, really a lot of what we're going to be looking at here is the care plan, but before I talk about that, you see it in this first bullet here, the in home care services are often and this is kind of the federal language is provided either by "skilled" or "non-skilled" [workers].

Featuring

Joseph Muniak, MS, OTD, OTR/L, CBIS, HEM

Doctor of Occupational Therapy & Health Care Administration Expert

Dr. Muniak is a board-certified Occupational Therapist (OTR) and hospital administrator with expertise in the continuum of care provided to patients in the acute hospital, inpatient rehabilitation,… read more.