By Archibong Jeremiah
Dr. Genevieve Barnaby, Consultant to Ayade Care on Home Healthcare Services has revealed the importance of the scheme in this exclusive interview with CrossRiverWatch TV.
WHAT THE SCHEME IS ABOUT, HOW IT WORKS AND WHO TO BENEFIT?
The Home Healthcare Service (HHS) is a short term version of hospitalization, its replacing the acute care. It’s for the home bound people that are finding it difficult to go to the hospital, the vulnerable, the disabled, for children and also the pregnant women. It’s also for the people that are in the rural areas that cannot access the hospitals.
What we do is initially we would have the Primary Doctor (PD) go into the home, do an assessment after the assessing is done we now have what we call Nursing Care (NC) where the nurse would go into the homes to see the patient, now the Doctor is going to decide if they go by daily or weekly or three times a week and we are also going to send the physical therapist.
We are going to send the occupational therapist as well as the speech therapist, we are also going to have what we call the Home Health Aide (HHA) which is what you could call a glorified house keeper that’s able to do things like CPR and first aid, also we would have dieticians and nutritionists going in there for the diabetic patients.
HER WORKING EXPERIENCE
I started working with Medicare in the United States in 1994 and I’m actually the first black person to set up home health in Huston Texas since then and I’m also a Doctor of chiropractic, that’s taking care adjustment of spines and alignment of joints that’s what I specialize in but for home health I have been doing it since 1994 so I do have the experience.
STREET URCHINS/HOMELESS
We also have another sector of the home health which we call assisted living where we would create accommodation, an area where we would meet them and provide medical services. The ones that are on the streets we would create a facility where we would gather them take them there and provide medical services. It’s a home health service, they are homeless, they don’t have a place to stay but we are not able at this time to create shelter for them.
SOME IMPORTANCE OF THE SCHEME
I have been doing it for many years I know it works, I know it helps, you know there are people that are at home the paraplegics, the quadriplegics bed bound some of them don’t even have family members they don’t have loved ones to come and take care of them, do you know what it means to have someone come to the house and take care of you and the thing also about home health care is apart from the fact that you are going into the hospital getting medical services this one is better because we are now going to assess the environment where these patients live to know what else we can do for this client, we are able to tell if they have family members that can take care of them.
We can tell if the environment is safe or not those are all the aspects of home health that is very exciting that you would not get if you went into the hospital because the Doctor doesn’t have time to know all he’s going to do is take care of you, discharge you and you go home and you probably going to go home alone all by yourself but when you have the Visiting Nurses (VN) coming in it like you have a family, in the hospital it would not be possible but here the nurse has at least one hour to spend with the patient and its going to reduce cost not only for the Government but for the individuals.
CONCLUSION
This is a dream come true, it’s not going to fail, it’s not failed anywhere in North America, it’s the number one money making business, Medicare for the United States why would it fail here. I would advise you to key into it and start taking care of yourself.
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