Granny Nannies Review

Granny Nannies Review

These days, many seniors are organizing their lives to be able to stay at home for as long as possible; they’re looking for services and products that will allow them to stay in their communities and familiar surroundings. But finding the right services is essential: age, illness, and other health issues can make staying in the home a challenge. Fortunately, home care agencies like Granny Nannies exist to help seniors overcome such challenges. Some focus on higher-level care for those with especially serious issues, but Granny Nannies, like a significant number of its competitors, focuses on basic care that aims to maintain a senior’s quality of life.

Company Background

Granny Nannies was founded in 1990, making it one of the oldest home care agencies in the country. Since 1997, it has been expanding by selling franchising rights to independent owner/operators across the country. The company now boasts around thirty locations, making it one of the smaller organizations on the market. Perhaps because of its size, the company has relatively few reviews on employee review sites such as Glassdoor and Indeed—too few, really, to feel that we’re getting an accurate read on employees’ experiences among the company’s franchises. That said, most employees who posted reviews felt good about the company and about their experience there, a positive sign for the quality of care the company offers. In addition, they had the highest rate we saw of employees saying they’d recommend the company to their fellow caregivers, suggesting that employee retention could be one of the company’s strengths.

Services and Offerings

Everyday Help

Mobility and health issues can make even ordinary tasks difficult for the elderly living on their own. Granny Nannies offers the full range of home care services, including companionship services, help with recreational activities, medication reminders, emotional support, and help reducing the risk of accidents in the home.

Social Isolation Care

As an outgrowth of its basic home care services, Granny Nannies pitches itself as a resource for the families and friends of seniors who may be socially isolated or live far away from ordinary sources of support. Granny Nannies caregivers can help re-engage seniors with hobbies and other activities and accompany their clients to events and functions in order to reestablish contact with the larger community.

Fall Prevention Care

Again as an add-on to their basic services, Granny Nannies offers a specific focus on fall prevention, offering help with range of motion exercises, and an assessment of, and help addressing, fall risks in the home.

Specialized Care

Granny Nannies also bills its franchises as being able to tackle the care needs related to some specific ailments, including:

• Chronic lung diseases
• Alzheimer’s and dementia
• Parkinson’s
• Heart disease

Hospital Attendance and Recovery Care

Finally, Granny Nannies also offers hospital attendance services—private-duty care to supplement the care the client receives in a hospital or other setting—and dedicated help for those recovering from surgery.

Word on the Street

Since Granny Nannies, like most home care agencies, operates as a franchise, your local office will be independently owned and operated. For that reason, it’s essential to research local providers before choosing them for your care needs, which means asking for references and, ideally, talking with a couple of current clients. At the same time, we took the trouble of looking at over 100 reviews posted online at sites such as Yelp, Google, and Facebook in order to look for trends among the franchises bearing the Granny Nannies name. We found that the locations we surveyed were fairly well regarded, garnering a weighted average of 4.6 out of 5 stars, a significantly better result than some of their competitors. We also noted the following trends:

Provider Feedback

Across the home care industry, you can see one common theme: caregivers enter their profession because they sincerely want to help, and their clients respond to this compassion with admiration and respect. This was true of Granny Nannies’ caregivers, too, with the vast majority of clients approving of the care they received, despite some very rare reports of problems.

Smooth Administration

Interestingly, the customers’ satisfaction with their caregivers meant that it was difficult to get insight into how well locations were administered: there were relatively few mentions of administrators in reviews, either in a positive or negative light. That’s actually a good sign, as it suggests that there were relatively few hiccups in the process of selecting caregivers and getting them started with their clients.

Trust and Dependability

The overall picture one gets from our survey of reviews is of highly reliable caregivers—people who showed up on time and provided professional care while connecting with their clients. It should be noted that the isolated reports of problems we came across tended to involve a lack of punctuality and reliability with caregivers, but again, these issues were very rare.

Cost

In order to get a sense of the way a franchise’s charges stack up, we survey a number of locations around the country and compare the rates they charge with the local median as reported in the Cost of Care survey from Genworth Financial. (Note that even a sample of locations may not accurately characterize the going rates at your local office—that’s something that can vary according to location and the type of care needed.) Perhaps because Granny Nannies focuses on lower-level home care services, the company tends to offer rates that are right at, or a little below, the local median. We found, too, that these rates could change based on the number of hours of care needed. Finally, some locations operated as registries—middlemen who connected clients with caregivers who then worked as independent contractors—and that can affect the rates you’ll see as well.

The Bottom Line

As the name implies, Granny Nannies focuses on home care for the elderly, and its franchises offer the standard suite of companion care services, from light housekeeping, to transportation, to meal planning, to some basic assistance with grooming and hygiene. Granny Nannies also offers specialized companion care for those challenged by a variety of medical conditions, and for those facing the end of life or Alzheimer’s and dementia. In addition, Granny Nannies have a solid track record among online reviewers and offer their services at a reasonable price, making them an excellent choice for someone seeking home care.