Leading the industry
Nurse Next Door is an industry thought leader. We’re thinking constantly about the future of home health care and the forces that will shape our company and society over the next decade and beyond. We’re already offering or preparing to offer products and services that meet the trends we see dominating the field for years to come, including:
Caregiver matching
This is something we already do with great results. In line with our core value of admiring people, we recognize that each individual is unique, and that applies to clients and caregivers. We carefully assess not only clients’ medical needs but their likes, pet peeves, hobbies, tastes, and try to match a caregiver’s skills to the client’s preferences. We have a very diverse community here in Vancouver, with hundreds of thousands of Asian immigrants who speak Cantonese, Taiwanese, Mandarin, Filipino, Hindi, Japanese; caregivers who speak our clients’ native tongues can do their jobs more effectively and make the home health care experience much more meaningful. Nurse Next Door takes the time to hire caregivers with the right mixes of skills.
Pre-medical emergency care earlier in life
Just because a client doesn’t have an immediate medical need doesn’t mean he or she doesn’t need care that addresses emotional needs. Did you know that an estimated 60 percent of seniors suffer from depression? And what happens when you get depressed and lonely, and your friends and family are gone? You stay in your house. You stop preparing healthy meals. You lose strength in your legs and hips, and you fall. Household falls send more seniors to the hospital than any other cause, and Nurse Next Door helps clients adopt more active lifestyles that can keep people healthier for longer.
The shift in popular perception of seniors
It’s Betty White’s world; we just live in it. At 90, the actress and comedienne is as popular as ever. A couple of years back, fans started a Facebook campaign to have her host “Saturday Night Live” — and it worked! On May 8, 2010, White, at 88, became the oldest person to host the show in its 35-year history, and the episode drew the highest ratings for “SNL” in more than a year. Point is, nowadays, seniors are — dare we say it? — cool, an attitude we’ve always held at Nurse Next Door. And with married couples waiting until later and later in life to have children (if they have children at all) and an explosion in the number of seniors living ever longer, care for parents seems poised to take the place of raising children for successful adults in their 30s and 40s. “Women my age used to share kids’ stories,” says Judy Brooks, our chief of staff who hired Nurse Next Door to care for her mother. “Now we’re taking about parent care.”
Remote monitoring
This is the future of the home health care industry. Imagine a system that tracks a client’s vital signs and motion in their homes and alerts caregivers whenever something seems amiss — sudden immobility in the kitchen, for example, or a sudden drop in blood pressure. It would revolutionize the industry, automatically transforming the dynamic between caregiver and client and easing the emotional and financial burden on family members — not to mention allowing more seniors to stay in their homes. Nurse Next Door is developing a platform to incorporate remote monitoring technology, and we expect to roll it out soon.