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Home Health Aide
As members of a home health team, home health aides provide personal and homemaking services to ill, elderly, or disabled persons and to children of families unable to perform basic tasks for themselves. Their assistance enables the people they serve to remain in their own homes.
The responsibilities of home health aides include assisting with bathing, helping patients with walking and prescribed exercise, and helping individuals with braces or artificial limbs. Aides check pulse and respiration rates, change surgical dressings, and assist patients with medications. Aides plan and prepare meals and special diets for the family and patient and do food shopping. They observe the patient's progress, report findings to their supervisors, and help the professional health team to determine if services should be changed. Their supervisors are usually registered nurses but in some cases they are physical, speech or occupational therapists, or social workers.
In addition to their regular duties, aides provide patients with instruction and emotional support. They teach, through practical demonstration, such things as TRAINING REQUIREMENTS of nutritious meals on a limited income, proper care of children, and household management. Aides teach patients how to adapt to various limitations in their life-styles caused by disability, frailty, or illness. During periods of stress or depression they provide emotional support which is often critical to the patient's recovery and mental attitude.
Home health aides must be genuinely concerned about the total welfare of their patients. Physical duties include lifting, moving, and supporting patients. Aides work alone in the patient's home and must be able to travel to and from work assignments. Aides may work full or part-time, including weekends, and usually can obtain flexible work schedules.
A large number of job openings is expected for homemaker-home health aides, due to very rapid growth and very high turnover. Homemaker-home health aides are expected to be one of the fastest growing occupations through the year 2005 (more than doubling in employment size).
The number of people in their seventies and beyond is projected to rise substantially. This age group is characterized by mounting health problems that require some assistance. Also, there will be an increasing reliance on home care for patients of all ages. This trend reflects several developments: Efforts to contain costs by moving patients out of hospitals and nursing facilities as quickly as possible; the realization that treatment can be more effective in familiar surroundings rather than clinical surroundings; and the development of portable medical equipment for in-home treatment.
In addition to jobs created by the increase in demand for these workers, replacement needs are expected to produce numerous openings. Turnover is high, a reflection of the relatively low skill requirements, low pay, and high emotional demands of the work. For these same reasons, many people are unwilling to do this kind of work. Therefore, persons who are interested in this work and suited for it should have excellent job opportunities, particularly those with experience or training as homemaker-home health aides or nursing aides.
Homemaker-home health aide is a service occupation that combines duties of health workers and social service workers. Workers in related occupations that involve personal contact to help or instruct others include attendants in children’s institutions, childcare attendants at schools, child monitors, companions, nursing aides, nursery school attendants, occupational therapy aides, playroom attendants, and psychiatric aides.
$17,118
*NATIONAL MEDIAN SALARIES CITED COURTESY OF ONE OF THE FOLLOWING SOURCES:
- UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF LABOR OR HEALTHCARE PROFESSIONAL ASSOCIATIONS
- 2003 ASHA Omnibus Survey
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