Home Instead Senior Care was awful to deal with regarding our mother's end-of-life care last…read moreautumn. We hired them to provide 12-hour night-time care, from 8:00 p.m. to 8:00 a.m., on Sundays through Thursdays. We were assured by them that they had, could, and would provide experienced staff for our needs. Our mother lay in her bed in her Assisted Living apartment, in hospice, with dementia and declining health, slowly dying. They did not meet either their obligations or our needs.
Their one "experienced" nighttime caregiver, they kept pulling off the job for other, evidently more important daytime clients, and they kept sending us totally new and inexperienced caregivers who, frankly, didn't seem to care. Despite strict instructions to NOT SLEEP on the job, and the knowledge that we had nanny-cams in the apartment, one of the "substitutes" even brought her own blanket, and slept on the sofa for several hours at a time before we finally demanded she be removed from the assignment. Another person assigned to our contract cancelled routinely, at least once a week, on zero notice, with seemingly made-up excuses. The firm routinely failed to send a replacement. Their attitude was one of pretty words of regret and "so sorry," but, in point of fact, of flipping the problem back into our laps with no notice, no backup, and, seemingly, no qualms. The only solution to this problem which they left us, was for our closest family member, who lives 2.5 hours away in Chicago, to drop everything and drive down to "take the shift" for which Home Instead had been hired under contract.
We finally had to fire Home Instead Senior Care for breach of contract. Finding a replacement on short notice was impossible. We ended up having to do the job ourselves. We did this by multiple family members tag-teaming observation of our mother all night via the security cameras. We had to then call the night nurse at her facility (since our mom had dementia and had no idea of how to use the call-for-help button) if there was a material problem. It was infuriating, insulting, and just added to our stress and heartbreak. This firm not only didn't lessen our burden, they doubled it at a time when we were desperate and vulnerable. Home Instead's idea of job performance was clearly "Family Instead." As an EMT friend of mine once said, "Run as from fire." This firm was just dreadful.