How to Find the Right Home Care Services for Migrant Patients

Home care services are an excellent alternative for people who need assistance on a regular basis, be it for health reasons, or because of age. Access to such services, however, may prove problematic for migrants.

Why Hire Home Care Services Providers

There can be many reasons why you’d need services provided at home, but typically home care services involve palliative care, assistance for the elderly who do not want to move to assisted living facilities, and support to people with disabilities. Here, we’ll introduce the distinction between domestic care services and home health care services which are usually provided by medical personnel (licensed nurses and therapists).

Domestic Services

• • House cleaning

• • Grocery shopping & other errands

• • Administrative tasks (filling & mailing forms, sending mail, etc.)

• • Meal preparation or delivery

• • Personal care (bathing, grooming, dressing)

• • Transportation

• Assistance with mobility

Home Health Care Services

• • Physical & speech therapy

• • Disease management

• • Medication monitoring & reminders

• Medical care (catheter, injections, wound dressing)

If you’re considering hiring a home care services provider, make sure the interview process will involve your family and caregivers. As a group, you should prepare a list of questions you may want to ask before deciding to entrust people into your home and your life.

How Can Migrants Find the Right Home Care Services

This is not news: access to healthcare and associated services for migrants is no walk in the park. In too many cases, cultural and language barriers make it difficult, if not impossible, to receive appropriate home services, not to mention financial challenges. While a social network may organize support to migrants with disabilities, delivering palliative or chronic care services proves more complicated.

Ideally, case management would remedy the problem by enrolling migrant patients and ensuring the care process runs smoothly and efficiently. Unfortunately, lack of effective communication, lack of comprehension of the cultural differences, and sometimes discrimination severely affect the outcome.      

When people need medical support, they generally experience a high level of distress and anxiety. This is even truer when those people are in a foreign country, are unfamiliar with the system to a degree, are unaware of their rights, or worrying they could face medical deportation that would further deteriorate their health. As a consequence, many prefer to ignore their needs for home care services, putting their successful recovery at risk. For those patients to receive proper health care, case managers should consider working with chronic care facilities located in the patient’s country of origin or, in the case of refugees who were in danger in their homeland or fled war, to a country that will provide modern and skilled services.

Allista is such a place, dedicated to offering the highest quality of chronic care to migrants who cannot access or afford services in the US and Canada. Through Americas Hospital and Hospital en Casa, Allista provides a safe and supportive environment with skilled medical professionals, without putting patients in a difficult financial situation.