Interim Healthcare Review

Interim Healthcare Review

As people get older, they often deal with the challenges of aging by moving out of their homes and into places that can accommodate their needs for assistance. Many, however, choose an alternative path: rather than moving, they seek help, and in this way allow themselves to age in the homes and communities they love. Perhaps because it also provides a range of medical professionals on a temporary basis to hospitals and other health care organizations, Interim Healthcare is one of the nation’s best known home care agencies. True to its diverse markets, the company offers a range of home care services, and can take care of seniors at several stages of the aging process.

Company Background

Founded in 1966, and operating as a temporary medical staffing franchise for most of its existence, Interim Healthcare also offers home care services from its roughly 325 franchised locations throughout the US. While each franchise location is independently owned and operated, national offices do exert some influence on their franchises by imposing standards and by training franchise owners, and it can sometimes pay to look at these franchises from a national perspective. In order to get an inside look at Interim locations and get a handle on national trends among the company’s locations, we turned to employee review sites like Glassdoor and Indeed—and Interim came out about average in this respect, with employee ratings in the middle range among home care companies. And just over half of the reviewers at Glassdoor said that they would recommend the company to their peers looking for work, which suggests that caregiver longevity and turnover would be about what you would expect in the home care industry.

Services and Offerings

Companion Care

Interim provides all the lower-level services associated with basic senior care, including simple companionship, medication reminders, help with laundry, housekeeping, and meal preparation. Many locations also provide transportation services as well.

Higher-level Care

Interim also provides a full range of higher-level home services, including personal care tasks like feeding, toileting, and mobility assistance. The company can also assist clients working through physical therapy programs and can provide caregivers with a skilled nursing background in more demanding cases (as state law allows).

End-of-life and Bereavement Care

Interim offers specially trained caregivers for clients approaching the end of life, and has a dedicated set of programs for seniors dealing with grief and bereavement, including bereavement counseling and pet therapy.

Wound Care

Interim also offers specially trained caregivers who will take on post-operative issues for their clients, and in particular take care of wounds resulting from surgery or injury.

Specialized Care Programs

Finally, Interim offers a suite of additional specialized care programs, including speech therapy, care for those with Alzheimer’s and dementia, care for those in hospice, and care for a range of chronic illnesses.

Word on the Street

If you go online to research your local home care office, you should keep in mind that most home care companies operate as franchises, and the professionalism and expertise of the local owner/operator can be just as important in the running of a franchise as the reputation of the national company. For that reason, it’s crucial to get to know the local office and take time to check its reputation carefully—ideally by getting references and, hopefully, by talking with current clients. At the same time, some franchises do show trends across its various locations, and in order to look for these trends with Interim, we surveyed more than 100 online reviews of the company’s franchises from locations in every part of the country. We found that while Interim’s locations were, overall, on a par with their competitors in the industry, enough people had had enough issues with their local office to pull Interim’s ratings down somewhat, giving them an overall weighted rating of 3.8 out of 5 stars. We also noticed the following trends:

People Like Their Caregivers

Very few people enter home care as a profession if they don’t already have an impulse to help people in need. Across the industry, customers tend to be more happy than not with their caregivers, and the same was true of Interim. The majority of consumers whose reviews we surveyed found their helpers compassionate and competent, and appreciated the care they received.

Office Staff and Administration

On balance, people also felt that their care was administered appropriately, though Interim, like many home care agencies, had customers complaining about problems with scheduling and with caregivers not arriving for scheduled shifts, and there were a few scattered complaints about communication between office staff and caregivers, and clients and their families.

Trust and Dependability

In this category, Interim again scored on a par with its competitors, but also had some of the issues of caregiver scheduling and reliability that plague most home care companies.

Cost

Just as a franchise’s quality can vary between different locations, costs can change as well. Costs also vary due to the types of care provided and local costs of living. Nevertheless, we surveyed a number of locations across the country and compared their rates to the local median as listed by the Cost of Care study published by Genworth Financial—in order to see if there were any trends among the locations.

Based on our survey, Interim comes in a little on the high side when it comes to costs for care, possibly because Interim tends to offer higher-level care in comparison to its local competitors. Some Interim locations do also require a minimum visit length of three hours, but will also lower rates depending on the number of hours that the client will require during the week.

The Bottom Line

Interim Healthcare provides a wide range of care options for those needing assistance at home, including basic lower-level companion care such as light housekeeping, laundry, and meal preparation. Interim also, though, offers higher-level care, providing personal assistance for such functions as feeding and toileting as well as a focus, if needed, on post-operative care and on clients needing physical therapy. The company also offers live-in care, 24-hour care, respite care, and can provide caregivers specifically trained for those with memory impairments and for clients at the end of their lives. For people with more complex needs, or for those looking for a single agency to help them throughout the aging process, Interim could provide the assistance they need.