Home Care Investigations Webinar Series

This video was recorded from the webinar on Wednesday, October 23, 2024.

The rapid growth of the home care industry has been accompanied by an evolving regulatory landscape and increased litigation. In this 30-min webinar, Dr. Joseph Muniak breaks down the standards of care for home care professionals as it relates to litigation involving falls, injuries, and claims of abuse or negligent care.

Transcript Excerpt

There is the home health piece, which has to do with your nurses and your aids or your therapist. And then you have more of your personal care attendants or or your home health or your home aids, companion care, it's sometimes called.

Each state, the regulations for those type of folks, they usually have it pretty well delineated what those responsibilities would be that falls on your health versus not. But, it's going to make a big difference here.

So as you can see, the National Institute of Aging describes home care as "care that allows a person with special needs to stay in their home, which might be for people who are getting older or individuals who are chronically ill, recovering from surgery, or have a disability." But, again, I think it's important to point out here that we have a lot of people providing this type of care, that don't necessarily need a really intensive health piece to it.

But they need they do need assistance with various things. Oftentimes, ADLs, activities of daily living, or they're bathing, they're dressing, feeding, those sort of areas, or just really kinda getting around. They need a little help with assistance. And those folks tend to not have the medical background in training. So oftentimes, you know, we're we're seeing issues related to that, but also too then, it's going to be very important to look at the care plan.

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Care plans, as I mentioned earlier, are really probably the most important piece when it comes to providing care in the home.

As you could imagine, my history is very much rooted in hospitals and and and health system based services.

When you when you're in the home, you're on a bit of an island, right? So you've got these folks who are getting older and older and have more and more health issues and complications, and now you're asking people with not much health training, if any, to help care for these individuals. So the interdisciplinary care plan or the care plan in general that's agreed upon with the family and within the company is very important here.

You want to make sure there's input from all team members. There's accessibility, from all people providing this kind of care in the home, and then you want to make sure that it's obviously followed through. Follow through on is going to be, extremely important here.

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.