Nurse Next Door Review

Nurse Next Door Review

Seniors who want to stay in their own homes throughout the aging process often call on home care agencies for help with the basics of living at times when the challenges of age or injury threaten their ability to perform essential daily activities. By providing companion care services like house cleaning and transportation, and by providing personal care services like help with feeding or hygiene, home care agencies allow seniors to live independently while staying in the neighborhoods and communities they love.

Nurse Next Door’s services include both companion and personal care, and the company also offers even higher level nursing care as well, all in the service of allowing seniors and their families the safety and connection of aging at home.

Company Background

Nurse Next Door was founded in Canada in 2001, and now has 150 locations worldwide, with about half of them in the United States. These are franchised locations, meaning that they’re independently owned and operated. Still, the central organization does provide on-the-job training to its franchisees, along with proprietary software and a set of security and safety procedures. And these standards seem to have had a beneficial effect on the running of Nurse Next Door’s franchises, judging by the reviews left by current and former employees at job sites such as Indeed and Glassdoor.

Employees thought relatively highly of the company, and nearly 9 out of 10 employees at Glassdoor said that they would recommend the company as an employer to other caregivers. Notably, employees also offered consistent praise for management—though it should be said that due to the relatively small number of locations Nurse Next Door has franchised in the US, there are also relatively few employee reviews posted at these sites, so they may not be representative of the quality of your local office.

Services and Offerings

Companion Care

The first level of home care services is often referred to as companion care, and Nurse Next Door offers a full range of companion care services, from basic companionship to light housekeeping, to meal preparation, to transportation to medical appointments, personal errands, and social functions.

Higher-Level Care

The next level of home care services is often called personal care: Nurse Next Door also offers a full range of personal care services, including help with feeding and toileting, hygiene assistance, and even some activities that fall under the heading of skilled nursing care, including medical support for those recovering from surgery or injuries.

Happier Aging

Nurse Next Door’s proprietary approach to care focuses on helping the client reconnect with family and friends and with activities that bring them happiness. This approach focuses on travel and adventure (including day trips and virtual visits to more distant destinations), learning new skills, social outlets (including family and friends), and play.
Continuity of care: Nurse Next Door does its best to maintain continuity of care in order to reduce the stress of the client having to repeatedly become acquainted with a new caregiver. Round-the-clock care is taken on by a stable team of caregivers for the same reason.

Caregiver Screening

Nurse Next Door also adheres to an exceptionally rigorous caregiver screening program. In addition to making sure that all caregivers are bonded and insured, franchises perform check references and perform background checks to ensure the caregivers have no criminal records. In addition, Nurse Next Door offers comprehensive training and continuing education to make sure that their caregivers are fully skilled and current in the best practices of home care.

Word on the Street

 In order to find out more about local businesses, it’s sometimes useful to have a look at online reviews at sites like Yelp or Google. Such sites feature online reviews of home care agencies, but while it’s easy to find lots of reviews of a national company, you can’t be sure that the review you’re reading will give you any insight into the quality of your local home care franchise. If you look at enough reviews, however, it’s possible to get a broad view of the trends in quality and customer experiences across locations, and that can give you some sense of what to expect even though your local franchise is independently owned and operated.

In order to get that broad view, we surveyed 35 reviews of Nurse Next Door franchises around the country—a low number for us, but again an indication of the relatively low number of US locations franchised by the company. Nurse Next Door locations did quite well in these reviews—earning a weighted average of 4.9 out of 5 stars—and in addition, we noticed the following trends:

Caregivers Received a lot of Praise

Across the industry, positive caregiver reviews tend to outnumber negative reviews: this makes sense, because very few people become caregivers if they aren’t already interested in caring for people. Nurse Next Door scored right in line with its competitors in this regard: in the sample of reviews we surveyed, there were almost no reports of problems with caregivers, and many specific reports of their professionalism in providing care.

Staff in the Office

 Especially for a company like Nurse Next Door, which prides itself on managing its clients’ cases and aims to provide consistent continuity of care, the quality of the administrative staff is crucial. In the reviews that we surveyed, Nurse Next Door’s office staff and administrative ability also came in for praise, with many reviewers specifically mentioning the owners of their local franchise for taking a personal interest and going the extra mile in caring for them or their loved ones.

Trust and Dependability

Reliability is also a crucial aspect of home care, and we look at reliability issues specifically as we survey online reviews. In this respect again, Nurse Next Door had a solid record: among their reviews, they scored a significant number of positive mentions of their caregivers’ dependability and initiative, with several family members of clients reporting that they felt they could rely on caregivers to provide needed care without prompting or asking. 

Cost

Nurse Next Door’s relatively small number of locations made it a little harder to find a representative sample of franchises in order to get a sense of how locations tend to price their services. And the rates home care agencies charge can vary based on the type of services required and the local cost of living. But we did reach out to a number offices around the country and found that, in comparison with local averages (as published in the Genworth Cost of Care study) Nurse Next Door’s pricing came in a little above their competitors in similar markets.

At the same time, Nurse Next Door does offer a free preliminary consultation in which the local office assesses the needs of the client, and, depending on the situation, may lower its hourly rate for clients requiring more hours of care per week.

The Bottom Line

A rigorous caregiver screening process and a focus on the client’s happiness makes Nurse Next Door stand out among its competition, and a survey of customer reviews indicates that this focus on quality providers and the client’s well being pays off in customer satisfaction. If you’re looking for quality care—and in particular quality Alzheimer’s and dementia care, or care for those in transition into or out of a hospital—Nurse Next Door is worth considering.