Welcome to Home Care: An Overview

Presented by Tina Marrelli and Kim Corral

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Video Runtime: 25 Minutes; Learning Assessment Time: 18 Minutes

This foundational course offering provides a big picture overview of home care. Home care comprises many models of care delivery systems and types of home care. A brief history of home care, a snapshot of where we are now by the numbers, and the differences between home care and any other health care practice setting are addressed. A holistic and practical definition of home care is also presented. Additionally, this course will also explain why having exemplary clinical, self-motivational, organizational, and people skills is key to success in home care practice and management.

Meet your instructors

Tina Marrelli

Tina Marrelli is the president of Marrelli and Associates, Inc., a publishing and consulting firm working in home care for more than 30 years. Tina is the author of 13 books, including the Handbook of Home Health Standards: Quality, Documentation, and Reimbursement (6th edition, 2018). Other books include A Guide…

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Kim Corral

Kim is a registered nurse with a master's degree in education and more than 30 years of home health experience. She is an experienced leader in home health care, having held both clinical and operational positions at regional and national levels for large corporate home health organizations. She brings a passion for providing…

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Chapters & learning objectives

1. Welcome to Home Care: The Health Care Setting of the Future

This chapter sets the stage for why home care is so different from other practices and business settings. Because the patients and families served are "out there" in the community, this different foundational construct has implications for care delivery, operations, and management, and sometimes home care team members feel "alone" because of this. In fact, this feeling, when reported, can be addressed and supported. This chapter provides a snapshot of some quantifiable data that helps make clinicians and managers know they're part of a large and growing community.

2. What Is Home Care, Exactly? An Inclusive Definition

This chapter provides a practical and working definition of holistic home care and health care services provided at home. In this chapter we address the varying models and structures of the kinds of home care programs that provide unique and specialized services.

3. The Environment of Care: The Biggest Difference

Generally, we only go into people's homes or get invited in when we know them. The person who lives in the home and their family members are truly the "unit of care" in home care. This chapter addresses some of these differences and nuances that impact practice and operations. From a practical perspective, this means that we function on somebody else's turf and home place. Though we may have been a clinician or manager where we had operational responsibility for a large group of patients in a hospital or nursing home or other facility, it is learned that in home care, this power shifts to the patient.

4. The Environment of Care Safety Implications

This summary chapter begins by describing a home visit or a shift in home care by showing an example of a patient, an older woman with chronic conditions that demand skilled care and visits. This chapter delves into the kinds of specialties that are seen in home care, another quality and safety factor when skill-matching patients and clinicians. The topic of how to make a home visit, which, of course, has implications for any type of home care, is presented in its own 60-minute CE course offering. Similarly, there is another course offering entitled Team Member Safety in the Community and Patient Home.

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