Services
Most agencies list the same nine services. The difference is who turns up, how often it is the same person, and whether anybody tells you what it costs.
Care usually starts with one or two of these and grows. You are not committing to a category — the plan gets written around your parent’s week, and it changes when their week changes.
Bathing, showering, dressing, toileting, continence support, transfers, skin care, medication reminders.
Most people do not want a stranger in the bathroom, and saying so is reasonable. We do not push. The first visits are usually built around something else — a meal, a walk, the laundry — and personal care starts once your parent knows the caregiver’s name and face. It is slower. It works far more often than sending someone in on day one to run a bath.
Personal care and supervision from caregivers trained in dementia, with routines built to stay the same.
If the hard part of the day is four in the afternoon to seven in the evening, that is when we schedule, rather than sending someone at ten in the morning because it suits a roster. Consistency of caregiver matters more in dementia than in any other kind of care — a familiar face lowers agitation in a way no technique does.
Conversation, cards, walks, church, the grocery run, driving to appointments and sitting in on them.
Isolation is not a soft problem. It shows up as weight loss, missed medication, falls and admissions. A standing weekly visit from the same person is often the cheapest care anybody ever buys.
Light housekeeping, laundry, bed changes, groceries, and real cooked food rather than reheated trays.
Funded home care will rarely cover this, which is why it is usually the first thing families pay for privately. It is also the earliest reliable signal that things are slipping: an untouched fridge tells you more than any assessment.
LPNs and RNs in the home — medication administration, injections, wound and ostomy care, catheters, diabetic support.
Registered with CLPNA and CRNA. Some nursing may already be covered by your funded home care plan, and we will tell you when that is the case rather than billing you for it.
Cover for the first days after discharge, when readmissions happen.
A Glenrose discharge and a Grey Nuns discharge need different plans. We take referrals from the University of Alberta Hospital, the Royal Alexandra, the Grey Nuns, the Misericordia, the Glenrose and the Sturgeon in St. Albert, and we can usually start within 48 hours of a discharge date being set.
Hours, days or a fortnight, so the person doing the caring can stop.
Alberta’s Special Needs Assistance grant can cover respite for eligible seniors, up to $5,872 a year across eligible categories. Ask us and we will point you at the application. More on Alberta benefits.
Overnight sleeping or awake cover, rotating 24-hour teams, or a live-in caregiver.
We publish what this costs and we will tell you plainly when it stops making financial sense against a Type B supportive living placement. The numbers are here.
Comfort, personal care and presence at home, alongside the Edmonton Zone palliative team.
We work with, not instead of, the palliative programme and your family doctor. Most of what families need at this stage is somebody in the house overnight so they can sleep.
Parkinson’s, stroke recovery, MS, ALS, COPD, heart failure, cancer treatment, frailty after a fall.
Tell us the diagnosis and we will tell you honestly whether we have a caregiver with real experience of it, or whether you would be better served elsewhere.
Where we go
Edmonton proper, Sherwood Park and Strathcona County, St. Albert, Spruce Grove, Stony Plain, Leduc, Beaumont, Fort Saskatchewan and Devon.
If you are just outside that, call anyway. Whether we can staff it reliably depends on the caregivers we have near you, and we would rather tell you no than take the work and send a different person every week.
Most people are not. Describe what is happening and a care manager will tell you what she would do, including if the answer is that you do not need us yet.