Personal experience leads couple to open senior care business

Chris and Amy Gehlhausen are celebrating the grand opening of their new business, Qualicare Family Homecare, Thursday.

A ribbon-cutting and open house is scheduled for 4 p.m. at their office at 873 Third Avenue, the former Wittwer Chiropractic office, for Thursday, May 15.

Qualicare Family Homecare provides a broad range of home-care and senior care services. Those include companionship, homemaking, and personal care. Qualicare services are available in any hospital or at the patient’s home.

A service through the company called 360º Case Management provides complete, coordinated case-managed care through the assistance of a personal care manager. “We follow the patient through the process, say for cancer, in which a patient is going to several different doctors and specialists,” Chris explained. “And we will be an advocate for the patient and the family members.”

Qualicare also provides home-care designed to take the burden off the family members who sometimes struggle to take care of family members. Services include live-in care, 24/7 on-call support, health care coordination, palliative support care, respite care, and navigation through the health care system.

“We provide a lot of services in the home,” Amy explained. “We can do home-making services, companion care, assistance with daily living, help with bathing, medications reminders. We can also assist with transportation to different events like shopping, running errands, picking up groceries, or for doctors appointments.”

Case managers are assigned to specific families and work independently with the family member through the process. Doing so takes the family dynamics out of the equation, according to Amy. The case manager is a neutral third party between patient and family. This support often encourages patients to speak more openly about their symptoms and health concerns.

“It’s nice to be able to assign one case manager to that family who can sit the family down at the end of the week and tell them the details of what is happening with their family member,” Amy explained.

Additionally, a registered nurse, Marie Weinel, oversees each case.

Chris explained the attraction to opening the franchise was partially based on his own family’s experience with his father. “My father passed away from cancer so I saw the process through the latter stage of his life where they had to bring in hospice,” he said. “It wasn’t enough.”

His father was finally placed in a nursing home which led to a poor experience in his father’s final hours. “It was a very difficult time and we were trying to have some peace,” Chris explained. “Although through no fault of the nursing home, it was hard to have that peace there.”

The hospice company eventually moved them into a better room for the final three days of Chris’s father’s life. “I just told Amy that there has to be something better out there for coordinating care,” he said.

Amy’s family is dealing with health issues with family members as well. “It’s a struggle. For us, it was knowing there had to be more options out there to find someone you can trust to bring in the home,” she said. “Not only someone you trust to bring in the home but you trust to make the right decisions to care for your family member. It is very personal for us because of what we went through.”

Amy explained that seeing their own parents struggling with care for their parents also compelled them to seek options to help people in similar situations. “Seeing the struggles that our parents went through trying to work full-time jobs and worrying every minute about their parents being alone at home and being safe is the main reason we began seeking out a business to provide this service,” she said.

They started looking at the senior care market and researched several companies before signing a franchise agreement with Qualicare last August. “We just felt like their values and their morals and the standards that the company believed in were very much aligned with what our values are and what type of care we want to provide,” Amy said.

The couple both worked at Aflac Insurance. Through their jobs there, they have been able to provide money to help individuals and families through hard times caused by illness or injury, but were never able to do anything on the personal side. “It just seemed that we were taking the next step,” Chris said about the decision to open the business . “Being able to provide on the personal side and making a difference in someone’s life is probably one of the biggest things that attracted me to Qualicare.”

Qualicare Family Homecare is open Mondays through Fridays from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. On-call staff are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The office phone number is 812-817-3009 and email address is southwestindiana@qualicare.com. Their website is http://qualicare.com/southwestindiana.