My mother is on the verge of needing to be in an assisted living facility, and have looked to care.com and other resources without much luck, so I am thinking about starting my own service that would cater to caregivers and aging adults on an on-demand basis. For example, with her lunch disease, she can no longer take out her trash cans, walk the dog, or water flowers. It would be nice if there was a service that offered Uber type assistance, without having to go through all of the profiles on certain sites. Would anyone besides myself use this type of service?
I like your idea but once a caregiver enters the house they may be called upon to do things for the elderly client that goes beyond the scope of watering flowers or bringing in the garbage cans. If a caregiver is watering the flowers, for example, what does that caregiver do if the elderly client has an accident and needs to be cleaned up? Or takes a fall?
I can completely see what you're thinking and as long as your service wouldn't include any kind of caregiving for an elderly person, that it would be strictly household chores, it could work. However, I know there are a lot of people who do this kind of work. I used to work in hospice and many of my clients had people that took care of things around the house and yard. The person on hospice didn't hire them--the family did. Come up with something that's unique about your service, that makes you stand out from all the others.
Good luck! I hope you get a lot of responses!
Personally I would NOT use such a service because I've found that private duty services, especially the franchises, aren't particularly honest or reliable, that workers aren't trained, sometimes aren't reliable, sometimes not just satisfactory.
I understand the consideration of creating a service when the existing alternatives aren't up to par. This is a dilemma which I faced, and based on posts here on hiring people for private duty care, I wasn't alone in dealing with this dilemma.
It was hard enough to have to rely on people I didn't know, but at least there were corporate resources that might have been available if problems occurred. I wouldn't think that backup would be available for a sole proprietorship, especially for an on-demand basis.
I applaud your initiative though. And if you really feel you want to make a commitment to provide services, do your background legal, financial, insurance and tax research, then decide on whether or not to continue.
I'm not unaware that people do these types of activities "on the sly", w/o proper insurance, but they run a risk of disaster if injuries occur or if liability issues are raised by a client.