The pandemic required several of Community Care’s services be temporarily placed on hold.  The government required some of the program shut downs.  Other programs were placed on hold as some time was needed to work out new protocols to keep everyone safe.  Community Care has carefully and with much planning opened most programs back up to help seniors live at home in the community.

Seniors who need help with light housekeeping, heavy housecleaning, laundry, meal preparation, etc. can once again call the office to arrange for carefully screened workers to come to the home for a reasonable fee.  The program has now reopened and we are accepting new clients.

Without access to homemaking, many people cannot get the practical things done that enable them to live at home such as housecleaning, doing the laundry, making the bed, maybe even making a dish from a favourite recipe that is just too much work for the senior to do themselves.

Although there is a reasonable fee for the homemaking program most clients see it as money well spent towards maintaining independence.  Homemaking is one of the supports that enables people living at home to have a good quality of life.

On a very practical level at times homemaking can also prevent admissions to the hospital.  People who get adequate support and monitoring are not as likely to have their health conditions deteriorate to the degree that they only get attention when they end up in crisis.   It’s important to recognize that in order to stay in their own homes as long as possible sometimes seniors need that little bit of extra support.

Community Care also offers a home maintenance program for seniors that offers screened workers who will do yard work, grass cutting, gardening and other outside work.  Snow shovelling is available in the winter.  This program reopened a few weeks ago because all workers stay outside the home so the risk is lower.  COVID-19 protocols are strictly adhered to.

For both homemaking and home maintenance, Community Care does the legwork by interviewing these home workers, checking references and performing police checks.  Seniors can be confident that this has been done and can arrange the time and date that a home worker will help.  The inside and outside home workers do this work for reasonable rates.

You must be signed up as a client of Community Care to have access to these workers.

If you’re not already a client then staff members will explain the process to become one.

For more information on homemaking or home maintenance call the Community Care office at 613-476-7493 and leave a detailed message so that we can call you back.

-Debbie MacDonald Moynes