Seniors Helping Seniors Review

Seniors Helping Seniors Review

As they grow older, many people make plans to leave their homes and enter some sort of senior living arrangement. But many others make arrangements to stay in their homes as long as possible. This can require some remodeling and some decluttering, and it can also require bringing people into the home to help with all the activities that necessary to maintain the person’s quality of life. Seniors Helping Seniors provides these types of assistance, and aims specifically to employ other seniors in the process of caring for their clients, all with the aim of providing caregivers ready to offer compassionate and competent home care services.

Company Background

Founded in 1998 and based in Pennsylvania, Seniors Helping Seniors began expanding through franchising in 2006, and now has around 140 locations across the US. Seniors Helping Seniors franchises are independently owned and operated, but the central company does provide some services and set some standards, including guidance on security and safety procedures, training, and annual conventions of franchise owners and employees.

In order to get a look inside Senior Helping Seniors franchises, we turned to employee review sites like Glassdoor and Indeed to see what people who work for the company have to say. In this respect, the company does quite well in comparison with its competitors in the home care industry, with overall ratings on a par with other companies, and with nearly two thirds of its employees saying that they would recommend Seniors Helping Seniors to their peers looking for work.

Services and Offerings

Companionship

Seniors Helping Seniors provides the full range of lower level home care services, including simple companionship, medication reminders, and light housekeeping as well as transportation and meal planning and preparation.

Personal Care

Seniors Helping Seniors also provides some higher-level home care services, including personal care activities like grooming and hygiene, feeding and toileting, and special services for those suffering from Alzheimer’s and dementia. Seniors Helping Seniors also provides respite care for families who need occasional relief from their care duties, and 24-hour care when needed.

Long Distance Check-ins

Like a few other home care agencies, Seniors Helping Seniors offers occasional check ins on seniors living alone in order to provide updates to relatives and other concerned parties about the client’s mental and physical health.

Lifestyle Assistance

The company also offers a variety of additional services that aren’t always provided by home care companies, including yard work, home handyman services, help with correspondence and bills, home safety checks, and pet sitting, all in order to facilitate seniors’ independence while they age in their own homes.

Recruiting Approach

While Seniors Helping Seniors doesn’t restrict itself to hiring seniors, it does make an effort to recruit seniors and others familiar with the challenges of aging in an effort to hire the most compassionate and sympathetic caregivers.

Word on the Street

Seniors Helping Seniors runs as a franchise, meaning that each location is independently owned and operated. For that reason, reviews of one location may not be an indicator of quality at the locations in your area. This makes it imperative to get a sense of the quality of care of your local office by asking for references and, ideally, asking to speak with current clients. Still, franchised companies tend to share standards, and will often have similar management structures throughout the organization. Because of this, it’s sometimes useful to get an overview of a company by surveying online customer reviews of locations around the country. We did this with over 100 online reviews of Seniors Helping Seniors and found that the company had one of the best track records of all those we reviewed, with customers giving the company’s locations a weighted average of 5 out of 5 stars. Among these largely positive reviews we noticed the following trends:

Compassionate caregivers

Home care customers tend to appreciate the front-line employees they interact with, and the clients of Seniors Helping Seniors are no exception. While the company focuses on lower-level care, it’s still notable that, among the reviews we surveyed, we saw no complaints about the quality of care clients received. People also praised the company for the help they received with items like home repairs and other things outside the ordinary scope of home care.

Office staff and Administration

We did note some issues with administration, a few complaints about scheduling and concerns about whether clients had gotten compatible caregivers. The vast majority of clients, however, reported satisfaction with the office staff they met, and several reviewers specifically praised the local owner/operators for taking a hand in their cases.

Trust and Dependability

Reliability is key in home care, of course, and overall Seniors Helping Seniors got high marks in this category as well. As noted above, there were some specific instances where people had problems with scheduling—with caregivers who didn’t show up when expected, for example—but overall, clients expressed gratitude for the care they received, and several expressed satisfaction with the caregivers’ ability to work unsupervised.

Cost

Since most Seniors Helping Seniors locations are independently owned and operated, the rates they charge for care can vary. Even at a single location, prices can vary depending on the type of care a client requires. Nevertheless, getting price information from a number of locations can give you a sense of what to expect when you sit down to discuss costs with your local office. Our survey found that Seniors Helping Seniors was right in line with its competitors in the industry in terms of the prices they charged for care, based on information on home care costs in the Genworth Cost of Care survey.

In addition, many offices will adjust their rates based on the amount of care needed, and the company doesn’t require a minimum visit length, meaning that clients have more flexibility in the amount of care they’ll have to contract for. In terms of the company’s lifestyle services, it’s hard to gauge how the costs of home repair or yard work compares to Seniors Helping Seniors’ local competitors in these fields, and we recommend that you shop around to make sure that your local office’s pricing is competitive.

The Bottom Line

Most home care companies take care of in-home services related to companionship and the personal needs of the client. Seniors Helping Seniors provides a full range of such services, but also goes beyond them to offer lifestyle help such as yard work, pet sitting, and occasional check-ins for the peace of mind of the families and friends of clients who don’t receive regular caregiver visits. If you’re looking for a home care company that will take care of basic home care needs and offers additional services as well, Seniors Helping Seniors is a solid choice.