Beyond The Walls And Into The Home: What You Should Know About Home Visits

Home visiting has emerged as an important service-delivery strategy because it potentially affords unique opportunities for reaching populations. Under certain conditions, home visiting have been shown to produce positive impacts on young children and older adults, and are also frequently employed as a means to reduce barriers to accessing health services.

Let’s learn more on home visits, here’s the four things you should know.

1. What is a home visit?

A home visit is a purposeful interaction in a patient’s home with the aim of promoting, monitoring, and maintaining the health of individuals and their families. A significant difference between a home visit and an office visit is that the health care provider comes to the client rather than the client going to the health care provider.

2. What is the purpose of home visits?

A home visit is done for the purpose of discovering unmet healthcare needs, detecting new medical problems and new intervention, and assessing unexpected problems in patient compliance with therapeutic regimens.

3. What are the four types of home visits?

a. Illness home visits involves an assessment of the patient and the provision of care in the setting of acute or chronic illness, often in collaboration with one or more home health organizations.

b. Visits to dying patients are made to provide treatment to homebound patients with terminal illnesses, typically in collaboration with a hospice agency. Before, during, and after a patient’s death in the home, the agency will provide important medical and emotional assistance to family members.

c. Home assessment visit is also known as an investigational visit, in which the healthcare provider assesses the impact of the patient’s home environment on his or her health.

d. Follow-up visits after hospitalization are beneficial when major life changes have occurred. Following a major illness or procedure, a home visit may be beneficial in assessing the patient’s and family members’ coping habits, as well as the efficacy of the home health care plan.

4. What should healthcare providers do before visiting a patient’s home?

Prior to the actual home visit, the health care provider should schedule a phone interview with the prospective client or family member to determine site safety and possible hazards. The healthcare provider should be on the lookout for presence of animals, drug or gang activity, history of violence, history of suicide attempt, medication non-compliance, past threats to an employee, persistent self-destructive or aggressive behavior, public health concerns, uncomfortable, and assaultive behavior.

Where there is no documented history of violence, no social stressors, and a stable condition/history, the site is considered low risk; when there is a history of aggression, condition instability, extenuating social circumstance, and threats of harm to self or others, the site is considered high risk.

A home visitor should not go into the home, or should leave the home, if the assessed risk of site is high, there is high evidence of drug sales and/or intoxication, there are weapons present, there is a violent dispute, a threat is made, and the home visitor is not welcome in the home.

As fewer patients are admitted to hospitals and hospital stays become ever briefer, the medical complexity of home care will increase, as will the demand for home visits. With GooZam Grow, as your learning tool, learn methods for a safe and quality healthcare delivery in the home. Let us create a safe space for both patients and healthcare providers. Subscribe to us now.