What is the name for this kind of nurse?

Question

A lot of old people have nurses that come to their homes and take care of them. Is there a specific name for these types of nurses?

Answer 1

You might be thinking of a Home Health Nurse.  These types of nurses usually take care of elderly patients or terminally ill patients. There is also Hospice nurse (which is just for the terminally ill).

If you are looking to just get started alot of local community colleges and adult education centers offer Home Health CNA programs that are pretty cheap. But the pay will be lower than that of a LVN or an RN.

Answer 2

I used to own a home care agency and that's what we did, send people to care for seniors in their homes.

Usually these people aren't nurses at all. More often they fall into two other categories, CNAs and caregivers. A CNA is a Certified Nursing Assistant and that's probably what you are referring to. A CNA has a fairly limited amount of training. It's a certificate program rather than a 2 or 4 year degree program. Often the training is done on the job in a nursing home and it takes less than a year to complete.

Caregivers are just a catch all term for any person who cares for another, usually without any formal training. If you helped care for grandma during her decling years you were a caregiver.

Agencies often send out caregivers for several reasons. Cost is a big one; they have to pay CNAs more. Availability is another; there are a lot more untrained caregivers than CNAs and many CNAs prefer to work in hospitals or facilities where work is much more steady. Another is that caring for seniors in their homes generally doesn't take a high level of training and most agencies restrict themselves to non-medical services only because, otherwise, they'd have to have malpractice insurance and nurses. When it costs many seniors $2,000 a week or more for care in their homes you can see the motive to keep costs down.

Many states require that an agency have a nurse on staff although that nurse usually doesn't do the actual care but rather supervises and trains the CNAs and caregivers.

I hope this helps.

Answer 3

Home heath care nurse.

Answer 4

If you mean giving baths and stuff like that, it would usually a home health care aide, but there are a few other things you may see.A CNA (certified nurse's aide or certified nursing assistant) has taken a short course for giving care in a long term care facility and have passed an exam. Usually they would be working in nursing homes, but it is a good certification to have when doing similar work. A CNA could also be a home health aide, and there are some extension programs that let you get certified in home health care. A personal care assistant (PCA) is not necessarily someone who has had any training, but they would do the work of a home health aide.

A home care nurse would be an LPN or RN that comes in to do more advanced things. There would also be a lot of nurses managing the cases and keeping track of the aides I mentioned before if they were working with an agency.